A rarely noted aspect of the era of novel agents and explosive new knowledge in the clonal plasma cell diseases is how short the half-life of relevant information has become, and how this churning has challenged clinical thinking.[1] We may, at times, lose sight of a core concept in the treatment of patients with clonal plasma cell diseases: that baseline risk to patient survival derives from t...

Using crude whole-genome assemblies, we analyzed 25 isolates of Neisseria gonorrhoeae by using a high-resolution single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) approach for nine housekeeping genes, characterizing penA alleles, and antimicrobial susceptibility phenotypes coupled with population structure analysis. Two clonal complexes, characterized by their spatial and geographical persistence, were iden...

Background Information A clonal population of cells is defined as those cells arising from the mitotic division of a single somatic cell. The somatic mutation theory of carcinogenesis contends that a tumor results from the progeny of a single cell having acquired one or more somatic mutations [1]. Therefore, one of the most important features identifying a cell as being neoplastic is its clonal...

The rules governing cell division and differentiation are central to understanding the mechanisms of development, aging, and cancer. By utilizing inducible genetic labeling, recent studies have shown that the clonal population in transgenic mouse epidermis can be tracked in vivo. Drawing on these results, we explain how clonal fate data may be used to infer the rules of cell division and differ...

In theory, females that reproduce asexually should enjoy a twofold advantage in fitness over sexual females, yet sex remains the predominant mode of reproduction in virtually all eukaryotes. The evolutionary maintenance of sex is especially puzzling in clonal plants because the transition from sexual to exclusively asexual reproduction is an ever-present possibility in these species. In this ar...

Challenges of assessing complexity and clonality in populations of mixed species arise in diverse areas of modern biology, including estimating diversity and clonality in microbiome populations, measuring patterns of T and B cell clonality, and determining the underlying tumor cell population structure in cancer. Here we address the problem of quantifying populations, with our analysis directed...

toxoplasma gondii is one of the most prevalent parasitic infections in world. rh, ned and me49 are of the most prevalent clonal types of the parasite isolated till now. differences in pathogenicity and virulence of different types have been investigated in different studies. no controlled study was performed to compare the ability of different types to initiate humoral immune response. we inves...

We evaluated the methylation status of the X-linked gene phosphoglycerate kinase (PGK1) and the DXS 255 locus detected by probe M27 beta to study clonality in acquired aplastic anemia (AA). A total of 30 females were suitable for clonal analysis of peripheral blood polymorphonuclear cells (PMN) and mononuclear cells using a polymerase chain reaction-based procedure in 24 patients and Southern b...

Evolutionary lag-the difference between mean and optimal phenotype in the current environment-is of keen interest in light of rapid environmental change. Many ecologically important organisms have life histories that include stage structure and both sexual and clonal reproduction, yet how stage structure and clonality interplay to govern a population's rate of evolution and evolutionary lag is ...