OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Mutational falsetto is a functional voice disorder characterized by failure of the male high-pitched preadolescent voice to transition to the lower pitch of adolescence and adulthood. Few objective outcomes data exist regarding the effectiveness of voice therapy for this poorly understood disorder. This study examined the immediate effects of a single therapy session using...

Chromohalobacter salexigens, a Gammaproteobacterium belonging to the family Halomonadaceae, shows a broad salinity range for growth. In order to reveal the factors influencing architecture of protein coding genes in C. salexigens, pattern of synonymous codon usage bias has been investigated. Overall codon usage analysis of the microorganism revealed that C and G ending codons are predominantly ...

BACKGROUND In spite of extensive research on the effect of mutation and selection on codon usage, a general model of codon usage bias due to mutational bias has been lacking. Because most amino acids allow synonymous GC content changing substitutions in the third codon position, the overall GC bias of a genome or genomic region is highly correlated with GC3, a measure of third position GC conte...

We examine robustness to mutations in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans and the role of single-copy and duplicate genes in it. We do so by integrating complete genome sequence and microarray gene expression data with results from a genome-scale study using RNA interference (RNAi) to temporarily eliminate the functions of more than 16000 worm genes. We found that 89% of single-copy and 96...

Biological systems are resistant to perturbations caused by the environment and by the intrinsic noise of the system. Robustness to mutations is a particular aspect of robustness in which the phenotype is resistant to genotypic variation. Mutational robustness has been linked to the ability of the system to generate heritable genetic variation (a property known as evolvability). It is known tha...

The genetic diversity of growing cellular populations, such as biofilms, solid tumours or developing embryos, is thought to be dominated by rare, exceptionally large mutant clones. Yet, the emergence of these mutational jackpot events is only understood in well-mixed populations, where they stem from mutations that arise during the first few cell divisions. To study jackpot events in spatially ...

There has been considerable recent interest in deciphering the adaptive properties underlying the structure and function of metabolic networks. Various features of metabolic networks such as the global topology, distribution of fluxes, and mutational robustness, have been proposed to have adaptive significance and hence reflect design principles. However, whether evolutionary processes alternat...

Nongenetic perturbations, such as environmental change or developmental noise, can induce novel phenotypes. If an induced phenotype appears recurrently and confers a fitness advantage, selection may promote its genetic stabilization. Nongenetic perturbations can thus initiate evolutionary innovation. Genetic variation that is not usually phenotypically visible may play an important role in this...

Much remains unknown about the progression and heterogeneity of mutational processes in different cancers and their diagnostic and clinical potential. A growing body of evidence supports mutation rate dependence on the local DNA sequence context for various types of mutations. We propose several tools for the analysis of cancer context-dependent mutations, which are implemented in an online com...

LysR-type transcription regulators (LTTRs) comprise one of the largest families transcriptional in bacteria. They are typically homo-tetrameric proteins and interact with promoter DNA ~ 50–60 bp. Earlier biochemical studies have suggested that LTTR binding to bends and, upon inducer binding, bend angle is reduced through a quaternary structure change tetrameric LTTR, leading activation transcri...