Long sequencing reads generated by single-molecule sequencing technology offer the possibility of dramatically improving the contiguity of genome assemblies. The biggest challenge today is that long reads have relatively high error rates, currently around 15%. The high error rates make it difficult to use this data alone, particularly with highly repetitive plant genomes. Errors in the raw data...

The Brill–Hartle gravitational geon construct as a spherical shell of small amplitude, high frequency gravitational waves is reviewed and critically analyzed. The Regge–Wheeler formalism is used to represent gravitational wave perturbations of the spherical background as a superposition of tensor spherical harmonics and an attempt is made to build a non–singular solution to meet the requirement...

Without Christianity, the world would be a better place. So says a growing body of scholarship on the effects of religion on physical and mental health. The central claim is that Christian belief and practices are neutral or positively bad for your health, and that studies to the contrary are badly flawed, “weak,” or inconsistent with other studies and, hence, can be ignored. In one recent arti...

The transcriptome of triangle sail mussel Hyriopsis cumingii (Lea) using Illumina paired-end sequencing technology was conducted and analyzed. Equal quantities of total RNA isolated from six tissues, including gonads, hepatopancreas, foot, mantel, gills and adductor muscles, were pooled to construct a cDNA library. A total of 58.09 million clean reads with 98.48 % Q20 bases were generated. Clus...

Metagenomics is providing striking insights into the ecology of microbial communities. The recently developed massively parallel 454 pyrosequencing technique gives the opportunity to rapidly obtain metagenomic sequences at a low cost and without cloning bias. However, the phylogenetic analysis of the short reads produced represents a significant computational challenge. The phylogenetic algorit...

Pyrosequencing targeting the V1-V3 hypervariable of the 16S rDNA was used to investigate the bacterial diversity in river and roof-harvested rainwater (RHRW) used for potable purposes by rural households in Luthengele village in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The phylum Proteobacteria dominated the data set (80.5 % of all reads), while 4.2 % of the reads could not be classified to a...