In Comamonas testosteroni strain BR6020, metabolism of isovanillate (iVan; 3-hydroxy-4-methoxybenzoate), vanillate (Van; 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzoate), and veratrate (Ver; 3,4-dimethoxybenzoate) proceeds via protocatechuate (Pca; 3,4-dihydroxybenzoate). A 13.4-kb locus coding for the catabolic enzymes that channel the three substrates to Pca was cloned. O demethylation is mediated by the phthala...

In order to understand the genetic basis for the evolutionary success of modern humans, it is necessary to compare their genetic makeup to that of closely related species. Unfortunately, our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, are evolutionarily quite distant. With the advent of ancient DNA study and more recently paleogenomics - the study of the genomes of ancient organisms - it has bec...

Ivan Illich's attack on modern medicine, Medical Nemesis, appeared in 1974. The book famously opened with the statement: 'The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.' Forty years after its publication, this paper examines the major themes of the book, and asks whether events since its publication have added weight to Illich's thesis.

The Padmakar–Ivan (PI) index of a graph G is defined as the sum of terms [mu(e) + mv(e)] over all edges of G, where e is an edge, connecting the vertices u and v, wheremu(e) is the number of edges of G lying closer to the vertex u than to the vertex v, and where mv(e) is defined analogously. The extremal values of the PI index are determined in the class of connected bipartite graphs with a giv...

Comparisons of whole-genome sequences from ancient and contemporary samples have pointed to several instances of archaic admixture through interbreeding between the ancestors of modern non-Africans and now extinct hominids such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. One implication of these findings is that some adaptive features in contemporary humans may have entered the population via gene flow wit...

This article evaluates bias in one class of methods used to estimate archaic admixture in modern humans. These methods study the pattern of allele sharing among modern and archaic genomes. They are sensitive to "ghost" admixture, which occurs when a population receives archaic DNA from sources not acknowledged by the statistical model. The effect of ghost admixture depends on two factors: branc...

Discontinuous traits of the cranium are used in a comparison of six Archaic skeletal samples from the Great Lakes region and six northern Ohio Late Archaic (Glacial Kame) skeletal samples. The Smith-Grewal measure of divergence with the Freeman-Tukey transformation is used to establish biologic distances among the populations represented by the samples. Principal coordinates analysis is used as...