BACKGROUND The condition of paraspinal muscles is known to be associated with some variables such as age, gender, and low back pain. It is generally agreed that these muscles play an important role in the stability and functional movements of the lumbar vertebral column. Although spinal instability has been shown to play an essential role in degenerative lumbar spinal stenosis (DLSS), the role ...

Haplotype tagging is a means of retaining most of the information in high density marker maps, while reducing genotyping requirements. Estimates of the numbers of tagging SNPs required to cover the human genome have varied widely, ranging from 100,000 to 1,000,000. Tagging has been applied to a number of gene-based datasets but has not been evaluated in contexts reflecting those of genome-wide ...

CONTENTS Chapter 1 General introduction 7 Chapter 2 Bone mineral density as a marker of cumulative endogenous estrogen 19 exposure: relationship to background genetic risk of psychotic disorder Chapter 3 Testing the estrogen hypothesis of schizophrenia: associations between 37 cumulative estrogen exposure and cerebral structural measures Chapter 4 Bone mineral density as a marker of cumulative ...

Genomic selection has been widely implemented in national and international genetic evaluation in the dairy cattle industry, because of its potential advantages over traditional selection methods and the availability of commercial high-density (HD) single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) panels. However, this method may not be cost-effective for cow selection and for other livestock species, becau...

Linkage disequilibrium (LD) is a measure of the degree of association between alleles in a population. The detection of disease-causing variants by association with neighbouring single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) depends on the existence of strong LD between them. Previous studies have indicated that the extent of LD is highly variable in different chromosome regions and different populatio...

Estimates of the number of chromosomal breakpoints that have arisen (e.g., by translocation and inversion) in the evolutionary past between two species and their common ancestor can be made by comparing map positions of marker loci. Statistical methods for doing so are based on a random-breakage model of chromosomal rearrangement. The model treats all modes of chromosome rearrangement alike, an...

Porcine F2 crosses derived from distantly or closely ‘related’ founder breeds have frequently been used for QTL mapping. Increasing marker density up to a maximum level can be done by re-sequencing and imputation techniques. This study investigated by means of simulations the mapping resolution and LD structure around causal genes of several F2 crosses with maximum marker density. It is shown t...

Introduction: Odontogenic tumors include a variety of lesions that are classified from hamartomas to benign and malignant neoplasms. Angiogenesis process helps neoplastic tissue to gain an adequate supply of oxygen and also to remove the waste products. Mean Vessel Density (MVD) evaluation is a common method for assessing angiogenesis by using different markers. To the best of our knowledge, t...