Recently, some studies have proposed to model inbreeding depression through partial inbreeding coefficients associated with founder individuals (Lacy et al., 1996). This approach allows to attribute the effects of inbreeding depression to specific founders (Lacy et al., 1996) and its assumptions has been confirmed in several traits in pigs (Rodrigañez et al, 1998; Casellas et al, 2009a), sheep ...

I n 1925, founder John Keefe 1 and in 1974, the late Tom Perry delivered presidential addresses to the New England Surgical Society (NESS) recounting the essential happenings of surgery in Rhode Island from its founding to the mid-19th century. We will not repeat the details of those excellent essays, but events from that era must be reviewed to permit an understanding of the course of events s...

Throughout their life, which can last for over a thousand years, plants have the fascinating ability to give rise to new organs from founder cells in their apical meristems. Whether these founder cells are equivalent to the pluripotent stem cells in animals has been a long-standing controversy amongst plant scientists. Here, this controversy will be addressed in light of classical observations ...

During Drosophila embryogenesis, mesodermal cells are recruited to form a complex pattern of larval muscles. The formation of the pattern is initiated by the segregation of a special class of founder myoblasts. Single founders fuse with neighbouring nonfounder myoblasts to form the precursors of individual muscles. Founders and the muscles that they give rise to have specific patterns of gene e...