The recent discussion of Birkhead (1998) may cause confusion regarding the nature of cryptic female choice and how to test for its occurrence. Here I attempt to (1) clarify the distinction between cryptic female choice and ‘‘sperm choice,’’ the primary focus of Birkhead’s discussion; (2) present more appropriate criteria for demonstrating cryptic female choice; (3) describe errors resulting fro...

Recent progress in genome-scale sequencing and comparative mapping raises new challenges in studies of genome rearrangements. Although the pairwise genome rearrangement problem is well-studied, algorithms for reconstructing rearrangement scenarios for multiple species are in great need. The previous approaches to multiple genome rearrangement problem were largely based on the breakpoint distanc...

The term "cryptome" refers to the subset of cryptic peptides with bioactivities that are often unpredictable and very different from the parent protein. These cryptic peptides are generated by proteolytic cleavage of proteases, whose identification in vivo can be very challenging. In this work, we show that insulin-degrading enzyme (IDE) is able to degrade specific amino acid sequences present ...

The Claisen rearrangement and its applications to organic synthesis have been studied for a long time.l In recent years, this rearrangement has been applied in stereocontrolled natural product synthesis2 and asymmetric i n d ~ c t i o n . ~ The term "Claisen rearrangement", which originally denoted the rearrangement of allyl aryl ethers to 0or p-allylphenols, has now been extended to analogous ...

A functional B cell antigen receptor is thought to regulate antibody gene rearrangement either by stopping further rearrangement (exclusion) or by promoting additional rearrangement (editing). We have developed a new model to study the regulation of antibody gene rearrangement. In this model, we used gene targeting to replace the J kappa region with a functional V kappa-J kappa light chain gene...

A likely mechanism of chromosomal rearrangement formation involves joining the ends from two different chromosomal double-strand breaks (DSBs). These events could potentially be mediated by either of two end-joining (EJ) repair pathways [canonical nonhomologous end joining (C-NHEJ) or alternative end joining (ALT-EJ)], which cause distinct rearrangement junction patterns. The relative role of t...

Phylogeographic studies call for attention as nuclear copies of mitochondrial DNA (NUMT) may generate erroneous results. Here, we report the presence of NUMTs differing only by 1-3 bp from authentic mitochondrial haplotypes, consequently named cryptic NUMTs. In contrast to traditional NUMTs, for which reliable tools for detection are established, cryptic NUMTs question the validity of phylogeog...

Here we show that suppression of VH-DJH rearrangement in mice bearing a mu heavy (H) chain transgene (mu-tg mice) is associated with an extended period of DH-JH rearrangement, the first step of Immunoglobulin H chain gene rearrangement. Whereas DH-JH rearrangement is normally initiated and completed at the pro-B cell stage, in mu-tg mice it continues beyond this stage and occurs most frequently...