Pakistani Himalaya stretches over a wide range of altitudinal gradients and supports high diversity of medicinal plants that are an important source for rural livelihood. Altitudinal effects on ground vegetation have already been indicated but ground vegetation is also under severe threat of grazing and over collection. The present study investigated the effect of altitude on medicinal plants a...

Wooded pastures with ancient trees were formerly abundant throughout Europe, but during the last century, grazing has largely been abandoned often resulting in dense forests. Ancient trees constitute habitat for many declining and threatened species, but the effects of secondary woodland on the biodiversity associated with these trees are largely unknown. We tested for difference in species ric...

In agricultural regions worldwide, linear networks of vegetation such as hedges, fencerows and live fences provide habitat for plant and animal species in heavily modified landscapes. In Australia, networks of remnant native vegetation along roadsides are a distinctive feature of many rural landscapes. Here, we investigated the richness and composition of woodland-dependent bird communities in ...

Wildland conservation efforts require accurate maps of plant species distribution across large spatial scales. High-resolution mapping is difficult in diverse, dense communities, where extensive ground-based surveys are labor-intensive and risk damaging sensitive flora. satellite imagery available at scales needed for community areas, but can be cost prohibitive lack resolution to identify spec...

Serial Analysis of Gene Expression, or SAGE, is a technology of measuring the expression levels of the mRNA transcripts. The result of a SAGE experiment is reported as a SAGE library, which contains the counts of various short segments (tags) of the cDNA clones. Through a close examination of the SAGE experiment protocol, we derive a new statistical model for the SAGE data, and give new tests f...

A comparison study of short SAGE versus GeneChip and long SAGE was conducted to determine if data were interchangeable between the techniques. Although SAGE and Affymetrix chip expression levels showed a significant correlation using the set of genes for which there was reliable and unambiguous mapping from tag-to-gene identification, correlation coefficients were low (0.51 for the Spearman's c...

A gene's expression pattern provides clues to its role in normal physiology and disease. To provide quantitative expression levels on a genome-wide scale, the Cancer Genome Anatomy Project (CGAP) uses serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE). Over 5 million transcript tags from more than 100 human cell types have been assembled. To enhance the utility of this data, the CGAP SAGE project create...

FoxA transcription factors play major roles in organ-specific gene expression, regulating, for example, glucagon expression in the pancreas, GLUT2 expression in the liver, and tyrosine hydroxylase expression in dopaminergic neurons. Organ-specific gene regulation by FoxA proteins is achieved through cooperative regulation with a broad array of transcription factors with more limited expression ...

Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) is becoming a widely used gene expression profiling method for the study of development, cancer and other human diseases. Investigators using SAGE rely heavily on the quantitative aspect of this method for cataloging gene expression and comparing multiple SAGE libraries. We have developed additional computational and statistical tools to assess the qual...