The so-called "Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selectiion", than the mean fitness of a population increases with time under natural selection, is known not to be true, as a mathematical theorem, when fitnesses depend on more than one locus. Although this observation may not have particular biological relevance, (so that mean fitness may well increase in the great majority of interesting situatio...

This study examined the potential relationship between participation in physical activity (PA) assessed by triaxial accelerometry and physical fitness testing, including health-related and skill-related parameters of fitness, in 136 Japanese preschoolers (65 girls and 71 boys, 5.5 ± 0.6 years). In partial correlation analyses, grip strength and 20m shuttle run test were positively correlated w...

background & aim: in the survival data with long-term survivors the event has not occurred for all the patients despite long-term follow-up, so the survival time for a certain percent is censored at the  end  of the  study.  mixture  cure  model  was  introduced  by boag,  1949  for  reaching  a  more efficient analysis of this set of data. because of some disadvantages of this model non-mixtur...

HARTL, DYKHUIZEN and DEAN (1985) have recently proposed a hypothesis for the evolution of selective neutrality. Their idea is largely based on the metabolic models of KACSER and BURNS (1973, 1979, 1981), which show that flux through a metabolic pathway will typically be a concave function of the participating enzyme activities. HARTL and co-workers suggest that, where natural selection favors m...

Many algorithms in robotics contain parameterized models. The setting of the parameters in general has a strong impact on the quality of the model. Finding a parameter set which optimizes the quality of the model typically is a challenging task, especially if the structure of the problem is unknown and can not be specified mathematically, i.e. the only way to get the function value for a certai...

Understanding the driving forces behind protein evolution requires the ability to correlate the molecular impact of mutations with organismal fitness. To address this issue, we employ here metallo-β-lactamases as a model system, which are Zn(II) dependent enzymes that mediate antibiotic resistance. We present a study of all the possible evolutionary pathways leading to a metallo-β-lactamase var...

The aim of our study was to evaluate the responses to an exercise programme with respect to initial fitness in subjects with cystic fibrosis (CF). 72 subjects (42 female) aged 10-43 yrs (forced expiratory volume in 1 s of 62.0 ± 26.7% predicted) were included. Participants were divided into three groups based on peak oxygen uptake expressed as % predicted. Subjects participated in a multifacete...

60 There is a lack of studies that analyse the association between micronutrient-related 61 biomarker status and physical fitness in adolescents. In the present study, biochemical 62 parameters for iron and vitamin status were studied along with objective measures of 63 physical fitness in healthy male and female European adolescents. 1089 adolescents (580 64 girls, 12.5-17.5 years) from the HE...

Due to their extremely high genetic diversity, which is a direct consequence of high mutation rates, RNA viruses are often described as molecular quasispecies. According to this theory, RNA virus populations cannot be understood in terms of individual viral clones, as they are clouds of interconnected mutants, but this prediction has not yet been demonstrated experimentally. The goal of this st...

BACKGROUND Not only in adults but also in children and adolescents, obesity increases the risk for several health disorders. In turn, many factors including genetic variations and environmental influences (e.g. physical activity) increase the risk of obesity. For instance, 25 to 40 percent of people inherit a predisposition for a high body mass index (BMI). The purpose of this systematic review...