Discoveries of mutations conferring resistance to infectious diseases have led to increased interest in the evolutionary dynamics of disease resistance. Several recent papers have estimated the historical strength of selection for mutations conferring disease resistance. These studies are based on simple population genetic models that do not take account of factors such as spatial and family st...

Many genes exist in the form of families; however, little is known about their size variation, evolution and biology. Here, we present the size variation and evolution of the nucleotide-binding site (NBS)-encoding gene family and receptor-like kinase (RLK) gene family in Oryza, Glycine and Gossypium. The sizes of both families vary by numeral fold, not only among species, surprisingly, also wit...

Gene selection procedure is a necessary step to increase the accuracy of machine learning algorithms that help in disease diagnosis based on gene expression data. This is commonly known as a feature subset selection problem in machine learning domain. A fast leave-one-out (LOO) evaluation formula for least-squares support vector machines (LSSVMs) is introduced here that can guide our backward f...

The current study was conducted to consider how pedigree and the gene-dropping analysis can use to monitor genetic diversity, and to recommend a breeding strategy for improving breast weight (BRW) in a population of Japanese quail. A total of 312 birds were divided equally into two lines. One line (S1) was selected for four-week body weight (BW) based on breeding value, and the other (S2) was s...

Identifying significant genes among thousands of sequences on a microarray is a central challenge for cancer research in bioinformatics. A multitude of methods have been proposed for this task of feature selection, yet the selected gene lists differ greatly between different methods. To accomplish biologically meaningful gene selection from microarray data, we have to understand the theoretical...

Traditionally, reproductive autonomy meant simply the freedom (assuming it was a real freedom) to decide whether to try and reproduce, with whom, when and where. However, now the issues include the questions of whether reproductive autonomy should extend to include, for example, social sex selection, buying and selling eggs, sperm and embryos, the selection of the characteristics of possible fu...