The prevailing paradigm for common disease emphasizes the role of common variants predisposing to various rampant health problems, and these genetic risk profiles interact with environmental and life style risk factors triggering the disease process and modifying its progress. However, most of what we know about the molecular background of common diseases is in fact based on what we have learne...

Amoebae of the Colonia (CL) strain, which normally produce plasmodia in clones, are shown to cross with mt3 and mt4 amoebae under appropriate conditions. Strains carrying mt3 and mt4 in a CL genetic background were constructed and used in the genetic analysis of mutants isolated in CL.

Two major sources of stochasticity in the dynamics of neutral alleles result from resampling of finite populations (genetic drift) and the random genetic background of nearby selected alleles on which the neutral alleles are found (linked selection). There is now good evidence that linked selection plays an important role in shaping polymorphism levels in a number of species. One of the best-in...

The use of a radioactive check device containing Strontium 90 was investigated to carry out the redundancy checks of Farmer-type ionization chambers. It was not possible to meet the recommended tolerance limits of the redundancy checks without taking into account the angular response of the ionization chambers. The ionization chambers exhibited a maximum variation of 1% in the angular response ...

The big bang model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories are introduced. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent oscillation and decay of the inflaton, and the resulting ‘reheating’ of the universe are studied. The density perturbations produced by inflation and the tem...

Using a large collection of European and North African methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolates with a variety of genetic backgrounds and staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec (SCCmec) types, we evaluated the reliability of the BD GeneOhm MRSA assay. Results revealed high performance of this test for detecting MRSA strains provided from Europe and North Africa (98.3%).