Although over 50 complete Escherichia coli/Shigella genome sequences are available, it is only for closely related strains, for example the O55:H7 and O157:H7 clones of E. coli, that we can assign differences to individual evolutionary events along specific lineages. Here we sequence the genomes of 14 isolates of a uropathogenic E. coli clone that persisted for 3 years within a household, inclu...

The complete nucleotide sequence of a Polish isolate of Beet soil-borne virus was determined for the first time. The genome organization was identical with those previously established for isolates from Germany and China. A comparison of the Polish isolate with others deposited in GenBank revealed high level of nucleotide identity, about 98-100%, throughout the genome analyzed. The ratio betwee...

Non-African populations have experienced major bottlenecks in the time since their split from West Africans, which has led to the hypothesis that natural selection to remove weakly deleterious mutations may have been less effective in non-Africans. To directly test this hypothesis, we measure the per-genome accumulation of deleterious mutations across diverse humans. We fail to detect any signi...

Reassortment is fundamental to the evolution of influenza viruses and plays a key role in the generation of epidemiologically significant strains. Previous studies indicate that reassortment is restricted by segment mismatch, arising from functional incompatibilities among components of two viruses. Additional factors that dictate the efficiency of reassortment remain poorly characterized. Thus...

Molecular chaperones dampen the effect of damaging mutations that would otherwise be removed from the population by natural selection. Here, I propose that the development of modern medical practice depressed this process, leading to a rise of phenotypically silent mutations in the genome. The background of misfolded proteins increases during ageing and, by competition, prevents the chaperone-m...

Incremental selection within a population, defined as limited fitness changes following mutation, is an important aspect of many evolutionary processes. Strongly advantageous or deleterious mutations are detected using the synonymous to non-synonymous mutations ratio. However, there are currently no precise methods to estimate incremental selection. We here provide for the first time such a det...

Forms of mutation never before described in the rpoB gene are reported for a sample of 20 rifampicin-resistant Mycobacterium avium Complex (MAC) strains isolated from AIDS patients in Thailand. All strains were analyzed by polymerase chain reaction-single strand conformation polymorphism (PCR-SSCP) and polymerase chain reaction-DNA sequencing (PCR-DNA sequencing). Sequence analysis of these str...

Background Neurofibromatosis is an autosomal dominant disease. It affects one in 2,700 to 3,300 people. The main gene mutated in the disease is a tumor suppressor protein called neurofibromin. There are several categories, the most important of which is divided into two types of type I and type 2 neurofibromatosis. Here, we aimed to identify th...

Message RNA (mRNA) carries a large number of local secondary structures, with structural stability to participate in the regulations of gene expression. A worthy question is how the local structural stability is maintained under the constraint that multiple selective pressures are imposed on mRNA local regions. Here, we performed the first genome-wide study of natural selection operating on hig...