BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Rainfall in western sub-Saharan Africa is related to seasonal shifts of the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone, which moves northward early in the year, retreating in the second half of the year. The objective of the present study was to determine significant relationships between onset and retreat timing and climate indices. The relationship between timing and malaria case...

A new procedure for molecular replacement is presented in which an efficient six-dimensional search is carried out using an evolutionary optimization algorithm. In this procedure, a population of initially random molecular-replacement solutions is iteratively optimized with respect to the correlation coefficient between observed and calculated structure factors. The sensitivity and reliability ...

A new species of Pseudotetracha from Northern Territory, Australia, is described and compared with Pseudotetracha marginicollis (Sloane, 1906). The position of the species in the genus and the subgeneric classification of Pseudotetracha Fleutiaux, 1894 are discussed. It is proposed that the genus would be divided into the following species groups: "australasiae", "australis", "blackburni", "cru...

Fish mercury levels appear to be increasing in Ontario, Canada, which covers a wide geographical area and contains about 250 000 lakes including a share of the North American Great Lakes. Here we project 2050 mercury levels in Ontario fish, using the recently measured levels and rates of changes observed during the last 15 years, and present potential implications for fish and human health. Per...

this study was carried out to determine the prevalence and intensity of amphistomiasis in native cattleand mixed breed holstein from mazanderan province, in the north of iran in association with sex, age, breedand season. during the 4 seasons of 2008, at meat inspection the rumen and reticulum of 132 native cattleand 104 mixed breed were examined by naked eye for amphistomiasis. all amphistomes...

a survey on the hover flies (diptera: syrphidae) fauna of northern iran, between 2010 and 2011, led to the discovery of the species pipiza accola violovitsh, 1985. both the genus and species are newly recorded from iran. all the specimens were collected from gilan and mazandaran provinces, using malaise traps. the diagnostic characters of p. accola and its geographical distribution is presented.

Chlamydia trachomatis is an obligate intracellular bacterium that exhibits a unique biphasic developmental cycle that can be disrupted by growth in the presence of IFN-γ and β-lactams, giving rise to an abnormal growth state termed persistence. Here we have examined the expression of a family of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) that are differentially expressed during the developmental cycle and the in...

vhs1 is a herpes simplex virus type 1 mutant defective in the shutoff of both host and alpha polypeptide synthesis. In cycloheximide reversal experiments, alpha mRNAs were significantly more stable in vhs1-infected cells than in cells infected with wild-type virus, whether assayed by in vitro translation or Northern blotting.

Anilios fossor sp. nov. is described from a single specimen collected in 1989 from Ruby Gap Nature Park, Northern Territory. The species differs from all other Anilios species in the combination of 20 midbody scales, 514 dorsal scales, a rounded, non-angulate snout in lateral and dorsal profile, a nasal cleft contacting the second supralabial and not extending to the head dorsum, and a large ro...

BACKGROUND The divergent glacial histories of southern and northern Europe affect present-day species diversity at coarse-grained scales in these two regions, but do these effects also penetrate to the more fine-grained scales of local communities? METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We carried out a cross-scale analysis to address this question for vascular plants in two mountain regions, the Alp...