When the optimal phenotype differs among environments, adaptive phenotypic plasticity can evolve unless constraints impede such evolution. Costs and limits of plasticity have been proposed as important constraints on the evolution of plasticity, yet confusion exists over their distinction. We attempt to clarify these concepts by reviewing their categorization and measurement, highlighting how c...

This paper presents our recent progress toward a fully automated system for cryo-electron microscopy that integrates instrument control, computer vision algorithms and machine learning techniques. It describes our image analysis strategies for detection and selection of filaments in highly noisy images using multi-level perceptual organization. At the signal level, we use the Canny edge detecto...

Ill-posed inverse problems of the form y = Xp where y is J-dimensional vector of a data, p is m-dimensional probability vector which can not be measured directly and matrix X of observable variables is a known J ×m matrix, J < m, are frequently solved by Shannon’s entropy maximization (MaxEnt, ME). Several axiomatizations were proposed (see for instance [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], a...

Hox gene activation is crucial for normal development of most organisms. Because of its importance, in both development and disease, it is intensively studied. Up to now, molecular methods have been almost exclusively used in order to explore the underlying mechanisms in normal embryonic growth (Tarchini and Duboule, 2006; Tschopp et al., 2009). The clustering of Hox genes is of particular inte...

PURPOSE This study sought to evaluate factors associated with hospital length of stay in cancer patients with febrile neutropenia. METHODS A prospective cohort study was performed at a single tertiary referral hospital in southern Brazil from October 2009 to August 2011. All adult cancer patients with febrile neutropenia admitted to the hematology ward were evaluated. Stepwise random-effects ...

The Hox gene collinearity enigma has often been approached using models based on biomolecular mechanisms. The 'biophysical model', is an alternative approach, speculating that collinearity is caused by physical forces pulling the Hox clusters from a territory where they are inactive to a distinct spatial domain where they are activated in a step by step manner. Hox gene translocations have rece...

Nonlinear spectral mixture analysis (NSMA) is a widely used unmixing algorithm. It can fit the mixed spectra adequately, but collinearity effect among true and virtual endmembers will decrease the retrieval accuracies of endmember fractions. Use of linear spectral mixture analysis (LSMA) can effectively reduce the degree of collinearity in the NSMA. However, the inadequate modeling of mixed spe...

Temporal collinearity is often considered the main force preserving Hox gene clusters in animal genomes. Studies that combine genomic and gene expression data are scarce, however, particularly in invertebrates like the Lophotrochozoa. As a result, the temporal collinearity hypothesis is currently built on poorly supported foundations. Here we characterize the complement, cluster, and expression...