The molecular nature of biological variation is not well understood. Indeed, many questions persist regarding the types of molecular changes and the classes of genes that underlie morphological variation within and among species. Here we have taken a candidate gene approach based on previous mapping results to identify the gene and ultimately a polymorphism that underlies a trichome density QTL...

Genes can affect natural behavioral variation in different ways. Allelic variation causes alternative behavioral phenotypes, whereas changes in gene expression can influence the initiation of behavior at different ages. We show that the age-related transition by honey bees from hive work to foraging is associated with an increase in the expression of the foraging (for) gene, which encodes a gua...

Variation at 12 polymorphic isozyme loci was studied in the European beech on the basis of an extensive sample of 389 populations distributed throughout the species range. Special emphasis was given to the analysis of the pattern of geographic variation on the basis of two contrasting measures of genetic diversity, gene diversity (H) and allelic richness, and to their relationship. Measures of ...

Coxiella burnetii is a strict intracellular bacterium with potential as a bioterrorism agent. To characterize different isolates of C. burnetii at the molecular level, we performed multispacer sequence typing (MST). MST is based on intergenic region sequencing. These regions are potentially variable since they are subject to lower selection pressure than the adjacent genes. We screened 68 space...

Expression studies suggest that the incidence and severity of tibial dyschondroplasia (TD) in chickens, Gallus gallus, may be affected by the aggrecan gene, AGC 1. Here, results are described of a scan for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in AGC1 in genetic lines divergently selected for TD incidence in chickens. A total of 3,048 bp of DNA sequence obtained from amplicons produced by 4 pri...

Diseases and phenotypes caused by disrupted transcription factor (TF) binding are being identified, but progress is hampered by our limited capacity to predict such functional alterations. Improving predictions may be dependent on expanding the set of bona fide TF binding alterations. Allele-specific binding (ASB) events, where TFs preferentially bind to one of the two alleles at heterozygous s...

One of the causes of variations in the expressed human T cell receptor (TCR) BV (V beta) repertoire is genetic variation in the germline DNA. Herein evidence is provided that allelic polymorphism may affect recombination frequency for a specific V gene. Two alleles of the TCR BV3 differ only at a single nucleotide position (C/T) within the 23-bp spacer region of the recombination signal sequenc...

Genome evolution in asexual organisms is theoretically expected to be shaped by various factors: first, hybrid origin, and polyploidy confer a genomic constitution of highly heterozygous genotypes with multiple copies of genes; second, asexuality confers a lack of recombination and variation in populations, which reduces the efficiency of selection against deleterious mutations; hence, the accu...

Low-molecular-weight glutenin subunits (LMW-GS), encoded by a complex multigene family, play an important role in the processing quality of wheat flour. Although members of this gene family have been identified in several wheat varieties, the allelic variation and composition of LMW-GS genes in common wheat are not well understood. In the present study, using the LMW-GS gene molecular marker sy...

A well-saturated molecular linkage map is a prerequisite for modern plant breeding. Several genetic maps have been developed for soybean with various types of molecular markers. Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are single-locus markers with high allelic variation and are widely applicable to different genotypes. We have now mapped 1810 SSR or sequence-tagged site markers in one or more of three r...