Background: Quantitative fluorescence-polymerase chain reaction (QF-PCR) is an inexpensive and accurate method for the prenatal diagnosis of aneuploidies that applies short tandem repeats (STRs) as a chromosome-specific marker. Despite its apparent advantages, QF-PCR is not applicable in all cases due to the presence of uninformative STRs. This study was carried out to investigate the efficienc...

Short tandem repeat (STR) variation has been proposed as a major explanatory factor in the heritability of complex traits in humans and model organisms. However, we still struggle to incorporate STR variation into genotype-phenotype maps. We review here the promise of STRs in contributing to complex trait heritability and highlight the challenges that STRs pose due to their repetitive nature. W...

The control of a class of combustion systems, suceptible to damage from self-excited combustion oscillations, is considered. An adaptive stable controller, called Self-Tuning Regulator (STR), has recently been developed, which meets the apparently contradictory challenge of relying as little as possible on a particular combustion model while providing some guarantee that the controller will cau...

OBJECTIVE Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common chronic disease for which disease-modifying therapies are not currently available. Studies to seek new targets for slowing the progress of OA rely on mouse models, but these do not allow for longitudinal monitoring of disease development. This study was undertaken to determine whether gait can be used to measure disease severity in the STR/Ort mouse mod...

BACKGROUND Whereas the prognosis of second kidney transplant recipients (STR) compared to the first ones has been frequently analyzed, no study has addressed the issue of comparing the risk factor effects on graft failure between both groups. METHODS Here, we propose two alternative strategies to study the heterogeneity of risk factors between two groups of patients: (i) a multiplicative-regr...

Y chromosome short tandem repeats (Y-STRs) are valuable genetic markers in certain areas of forensic case-work. However, when the Y-STR DNA profile is weak, the observed Y-STR profile may not be complete--i.e. locus drop-out may have occurred. Another explanation could be that the stain DNA did not have a Y-STR allele that was detectable with the method used (the allele is a 'null allele'). If ...

Leaf area index (LAI) is an important indicator of plant growth and yield that can be monitored by remote sensing. Several models were constructed using datasets derived from SRS and STR sampling methods to determine the optimal model for soybean (multiple strains) LAI inversion for the whole crop growth period and a single growth period. Random forest (RF), artificial neural network (ANN), and...