Polyploidy is an evolutionary process whereby two or more genomes are brought together into the same nucleus, usually by hybridization followed by chromosome doubling. As a result, the new polyploid is genetically isolated from its diploid progenitor(s) and a new species is formed. The importance of polyploidy was recognized early in the 20th century and for the past decades many studies have a...

Polyploidy is an evolutionary process whereby two or more genomes are brought together into the same nucleus, usually by hybridization followed by chromosome doubling. As a result, the new polyploid is genetically isolated from its diploid progenitor(s) and a new species is formed. The importance of polyploidy was recognized early in the 20th century and for the past decades many studies have a...

The Nanobiosciences Unit of the Joint Research Centre’s Institute for Health and Consumer Protection and Eurocolour, the association of European pigments, dyes and fillers industry, have carried out a program of work to evaluate a number of instrumental methods of measuring particle size distributions as required for assessing compliance versus the EU Recommendation for the definition on nanoma...

Because of their adaptation to a diverse set of habitats and stresses, wild species of cultivated crops offer new sources of genetic diversity for germplasm improvement. Using an Infinium array representing a genome-wide set of 8303 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), phylogenetic relationships and allelic diversity were evaluated within a diversity panel of germplasm from Solanum sect. Pet...

Stabilization of transposable element (TE) copy number involves the biosynthesis of short silencing RNAs (siRNAs) and further initialization of siRNA-mediated TE silencing. To gain insight into the relationship between the biosynthesis of siRNAs and their source TEs, we examined the co-evolutionary dynamics and expression of these two entities by characterizing the siRNA distribution across the...

The expected volume of the convex hull of n random points chosen independently and uniformly on the d-dimensional torus is determined. In the 1860's J. J. Sylvester raised the problem of determining the expected area V$(C) of the convex hull of three points chosen independently and uniformly at random from a given plane convex body C of area one. For some special plane convex bodies the problem...

This paper presents the results of an inductive, interpretive analysis of the perspectives of 42 Canadian high school distance education (DE) teachers on asynchronous and synchronous online teaching. The paper includes a conceptual overview of the affordances and constraints of each form of teaching. Findings provided insight into the following aspects of asynchronous and synchronous online tea...

We investigated the competitive response of oak and mountain laurel to prescribed fire on two sites in northeastern Connecticut. After nearly a decade, the competitive position of oak on moderately burned portions of both sites was little better, and in some respects worse, than on adjacent unburned controls. However, on portions of both sites where fire had killed much of the overstory, oak re...

If you cannot change things, educate those who will. Or, as George Bernard Shaw put it more cynically: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” the three authors of this Food for thought article have one thing in common: due to the generous support of the Doerenkamp-Zbinden Foundation (http:// www.doerenkamp.ch/en/), we each hold an endowed chair for alternative methods in toxicology, one at...

With its long history of cultivation, the domesticated apple, Malus × domestica Borkh., is an excellent model for studying domestication in long-lived perennial plants. As apples have been transported from their center of origin in the Tian Shan region in central Asia and moved along the famous Silk Road trading path, they have undergone selection for distinct phenotypic traits. In this study, ...