One of the major goals of computational sequence analysis is to find sequence similarities, which could serve as evidence of structural and functional conservation, as well as of evolutionary relations among the sequences. Since the degree of similarity is usually assessed by the sequence alignment score, it is necessary to know if a score is high enough to indicate a biologically interesting a...

BACKGROUND The Eda-A1-Edar signaling pathway is involved in the development of organs with an ectodermal origin, including teeth. In mouse, mutants are known for both the ligand, Eda-A1 (Tabby), and the receptor, Edar (Downless). The adult dentitions of these two mutants have classically been considered to be similar. However, previous studies mentioned differences in embryonic dental developme...

Beriberi has long been recognized as being of special significance among the avitaminoses. It was not the first disease to be associated with a specific nutritional deficiency, but the researches of Christian Eijkman into polyneuritis in the early years of this century, and Casimir Funk's apparent isolation of an anti-beriberi factor in 1911, led to the discovery and identification of vitamins ...

The discovery of vaccination was one of the greatest medical dvances of all time and, indeed, an estimated 8–10 million lives are resently saved on an annual basis worldwide by vaccines. Included n this number are the many that would have died of smallpox, radicated by vaccination in 1977 [1]. The potential for doubling his number exists if vaccines can be developed to control the major orld he...