Genetic erosion of shea trees, which has been on-going at an alarming rate, necessitated urgent conservation attentions. Owing to the vast geographical distribution species across Ghana, in situ germplasms was established by tagging and monitoring selected trees annually. Technologies have developed that enable be grafted, allowing for development germplasm banks research station Cocoa Research...

BACKGROUND Advance directive law may compromise the clinical effectiveness of advance directives. PURPOSE To identify unintended legal consequences of advance directive law that may prevent patients from communicating end-of-life preferences. DATA SOURCES Advance directive legal statutes for all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia and English-language searches of LexisNexis, Westlaw...

This paper is concerned with the selection and estimation of fixed and random effects in linear mixed effects models. We propose a class of nonconcave penalized profile likelihood methods for selecting and estimating important fixed effects. To overcome the difficulty of unknown covariance matrix of random effects, we propose to use a proxy matrix in the penalized profile likelihood. We establi...

In an intertemporal setting in which individual uncertainty is resolved over time, advancepurchase discounts can serve to price discriminate between consumers with different expected valuations for the product. Consumers with a high expected valuation purchase the product before learning their actual valuation at the offered advance-purchase discount; consumers with a low expected valuation wil...

this study compares diversity patterns of five microsatellite (ssr) markers in two iranian native horse populations (turkoman sahra and turkoman jergelan) to infer relationships between them and to compare levels of their polymorphism for use in conservation efforts. two populations across microsatellite loci had significant deviations from hardy-weinberg equilibrium. average number of alleles ...

Random genetic drift shifts clines in space, alters their width, and distorts their shape. Such random fluctuations complicate inferences from cline width and position. Notably, the effect of genetic drift on the expected shape of the cline is opposite to the naive (but quite common) misinterpretation of classic results on the expected cline. While random drift on average broadens the overall c...