Returning to the sea, just like invasion of land, has occurred in many groups of animals and plants. For flowering plants, traits adapted to the terrestrial environments have to change or adopt a new function to allow the plants to survive and prosper in the sea where water motion tends to rotate and move seeds. In this investigation, how seeds of the seagrass Thalassia hemprichii (Hydrocharita...

Germline mutations in CDKN2A gene predispose to melanoma with high but incomplete penetrance. Penetrance of CDKN2A gene was found to be significantly influenced by host factors (nevus phenotypes and sunburn) on one hand and by variants of MC1R gene (RHC variants consistently associated with red hair and fair skin) on the other hand. Our goal was to examine the joint effects of MC1R variants and...

The significance of human cutaneous pigmentation lies in its protective role against sun-induced DNA damage and photocarcinogenesis. Fair skin and red hair are characterized by a low eumelanin to pheomelanin ratio, and have been associated with increased risk of skin cancer. Cutaneous pigmentation is a complex genetic trait, with more than 120 genes involved in its regulation, among which the m...

Gait analysis is a feasible approach for human identification in intelligent video surveillance. However, the effectiveness of the dominant silhouette-based approaches are severely affected by dressing, bag, hair style and the like. In this paper, we propose a useful 2-D structural feature, named skeleton-based feature, effective improvements for human pose estimation in human walking environme...

Wool is produced via synthetic processes of wool follicles, which are embedded in the skin of sheep. The development of new-generation sequencing and RNA sequencing provides new approaches that may elucidate the molecular regulation mechanism of wool follicle development and facilitate enhanced selection for wool traits through gene-assisted selection or targeted gene manipulation. We performed...

Mineral content of hair is affected by season, breed, hair color within and between breeds, sire, age and body location. Seasonal effects may be due to stage of growth of hair and to changes caused by perspiration, surface contamination and diet. Breed and sire effects on mineral content of hair complicate prediction of nutritional status based on hair analyses because, in many commercial cattl...

lead forms the complexes with xylenol orange in the basic solution. an adsorptivedifferential pulse stripping method for the determination of lead is proposed. the procedureinvolves an adsorptive accumulation of lead on a hanging mercury drop electrode (hmde) inthe presence of xylenol orange, followed by reduction of adsorbed lead by voltammetric scanusing differential pulse modulation. the opt...

a 3.5 month-old girl was admitted with silvery gray hair, light  colored skin, recurrent diarrhea, chest infections, hepatosplenomegaly, episodes of pancytopenia, and hemophagocytosis in the bone marrow. light microscopy of hair showed characteristic large and irregular clumps of melanin in the middle of hair shaft. peripheral blood smear examination did not show giant granules in granulocytes....