Dengue fever, a viral disease spread by the mosquito Aedes aegypti, affects 50-100 million people a year in many tropical countries. Because the virus must incubate within mosquito hosts for two weeks before being able to transmit the infection, shortening the lifespan of mosquitoes may curtail dengue transmission. We developed a continuous time reaction-diffusion model of the spatial spread of...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate physical fitness in relation to fatness in urban and rural Greek children by means of allometric scaling. METHODS The sample consisted of 360 (189 urban and 171 rural; age 12.3+/-0.42 years) boys and 247 (125 urban and 122 rural; age 12.3+/-0.43 years) girls. The sample was highly representative (32-64%) of all 12 year old children registered...

W. J. Ewens, following G. R. Price, has stressed that Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection about the increase in mean fitness is of general validity without any restrictive assumptions on the mating system, the fitness parameters, or the numbers of loci and alleles involved, but that it concerns only a partial change in mean fitness. This partial change is obtained by replacing the...

Fitness is a central quantity in evolutionary models of viruses. However, it remains difficult to determine viral fitness experimentally, and existing in vitro assays can be poor predictors of in vivo fitness of viral populations within their hosts. Next-generation sequencing can nowadays provide snapshots of evolving virus populations, and these data offer new opportunities for inferring viral...

BACKGROUND/AIM The aim was to assess the differences between physical activity and physical fitness in obese, overweight, and normal-weight children. MATERIALS AND METHODS The cross-sectional study was accomplished using cluster sampling method at 3 Lithuanian schools. An analysis of anthropometric data for 532 Lithuanian children was performed. Height, weight, waist and hip circumferences, a...

ENGLISH/ANGLAIS] It is assumed that physically demanding jobs may have a positive influence on the physical parameters of workers. Thus the present study was designed to evaluate the influence of fishery, such an physically demanding occupation on physical fitness and to compare whether fishermen have more cardiovascular fitness, anaerobic power than sedentary population or not. The study was c...

Evolution of fitness values upon replication of viral populations is strongly influenced by the size of the virus population that participates in the infections. While large population passages often result in fitness gains, repeated plaque-to-plaque transfers result in average fitness losses. Here we develop a numerical model that describes fitness evolution of viral clones subjected to serial...

1 Fitness is a central quantity in evolutionary models of viruses. However, it remains difficult to determine viral fitness experimentally, and existing in vitro assays can be poor predictors of in vivo fitness of viral populations within their hosts. Next-generation sequencing can nowadays provide snapshots of evolving virus populations, and these data 5 offer new opportunities for inferring v...

By precisely manipulating the expression of individual genetic elements thought to be important for ecological performance, reverse genetics has the potential to revolutionize plant ecology. However, untested concerns about possible side-effects of the transformation technique, caused by Agrobacterium infection and tissue culture, on plant performance have stymied research by requiring onerous ...

Fisher's geometric model was originally introduced to argue that complex adaptations must occur in small steps because of pleiotropic constraints. When supplemented with the assumption of additivity of mutational effects on phenotypic traits, it provides a simple mechanism for the emergence of genotypic epistasis from the nonlinear mapping of phenotypes to fitness. Of particular interest is the...