Genomic imprinting plays an important role in mammalian development. Loss of imprinting (LOI) through loss (LOM) or gain (GOM) of methylation is involved in many human disorders and cancers. The imprinted 11p15 region is crucial for the control of foetal growth and LOI at this locus is implicated in two clinically opposite disorders: Beckwith Wiedemann syndrome (BWS) with foetal overgrowth asso...

Ninety-six methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolates from eight Korean hospitals were analyzed by multilocus sequence typing, SCCmec typing, and spa typing. The predominant genotype was ST5-MRSA-II of clonal complex 5, which was found in 36 isolates from six hospitals, but ST239-MRSA-III was also common. Overall, results showed a notable genotypic diversity of MRSA strains cir...

Species of Pestalotiopsis were mainly introduced as endophytes, plant pathogens or saprobes from various hosts. In this study, ten strains isolated Ficus macrocarpa, Phoebe zhennan and Spatholobus suberectus in China. Based on multilocus phylogenies the internal transcribed spacer (ITS), partial translation elongation factor 1-alpha gene (tef1α) beta-tubulin (tub2), conjunction with morphologic...

The mode of reproduction (sexual and/or asexual) and the mating system determine the patterns of gene transmission and genotype formation across generations. Schistosoma mansoni is a dioecious trematode that necessarily alternates sexual and asexual reproduction during its life cycle. In a previous study of the distribution of S. mansoni genetic variability within and between definitive host in...

Coalescent theory is a powerful tool for population geneticists as well as molecular biologists interested in understanding the patterns and levels of DNA variation. Using coalescent Monte Carlo simulations it is possible to obtain the empirical distributions for a number of statistics across a wide range of evolutionary models; these distributions can be used to test evolutionary hypotheses us...

Glycopeptide-resistant Staphylococcus epidermidis (GRSE) strains are of increasing concern in bone and joint infections (BJIs). Using multilocus sequence typing and multilocus variable-number tandem repeat analysis, we show that BJI-associated GRSE strains are genetically diverse but arise from related, multiresistant hospital sequence types (STs), mostly ST2, ST5, and ST23.

It is demonstrated that systems of two pleiotropically related characters controlled by additive diallelic loci can maintain under Gaussian stabilizing selection a stable polymorphism in more than two loci. It is also shown that such systems may have multiple stable polymorphic equilibria. Stabilizing selection generates negative linkage disequilibrium, as a result of which the equilibrium phen...

A map of the background levels of disequilibrium between nearby markers can be useful for association mapping studies. In order to assess the background levels of linkage disequilibrium (LD), multilocus LD measures are more advantageous than pairwise LD measures because the combined analysis of pairwise LD measures is not adequate to detect simultaneous allele associations among multiple marker...

The aim was to determine the evolutionary position of the Staphylococcus aureus clonal complex 75 (CC75) that is prevalent in tropical northern Australia. Sequencing of gap, rpoB, sodA, tuf, and hsp60 and the multilocus sequence typing loci revealed a clear separation between conventional S. aureus and CC75 and significant diversity within CC75.