Defects of mitochondrial (mt) DNA cause a diverse group of incurable, progressive diseases that often lead to severe disability and premature death. Most patients with pathogenic mtDNA defects have a mixture of mutant and wild-type mtDNA (heteroplasmy), and the clinical defect is only expressed when the percentage of mutant mtDNA exceeds a critical threshold. Since mtDNA is continually replicat...

Hypertension is an important modifiable risk factor for coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, end-stage renal disease, and peripheral vascular disease, but many of the molecular mechanisms and genetic factors underlying the development of the most common forms of human hypertension remain to be defined. Abundant evidence suggests that nitric oxide (NO) and one of its primary...

Some of the illnesses that plague man­ kind are directly related to our genes. Severe genetic disorders with no current therapeutic options—immuno­ deficiencies, haemophilia, thalassaemia, muscular dystrophies and cystic fibrosis, for example—could potentially be treated with gene therapy, which uses genetic informa­ tion to correct a mutation or to provide new functions for human cells. the ai...

In Search Based Software Engineering, Genetic Programming has been used for bug fixing, performance improvement and parallelisation of programs through the modification of source code. Where an evolutionary computation algorithm, such as Genetic Programming, is to be applied to similar code manipulation tasks, the complexity and size of source code for real-world software poses a scalability pr...

Abbreviations: Ad: adenovirus, bFGF: basic fibroblast growth factor, BMP: bone morphogenetic protein, CNS: central nervous system, ES: embryonic stem, FACS: fluorescence activated cell sorting, HIV: human immunodeficiency virus, ICM: inner cell mass, LIF: leukemia inhibitory factor, MEF: mouse embryonic fibroblast, RNAi: RNA interference, SCNT: somatic cell nucleus transfer, UTR: untranslated r...

Hypertension is an important modifiable risk factor for coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, end-stage renal disease, and peripheral vascular disease, but many of the molecular mechanisms and genetic factors underlying the development of the most common forms of human hypertension remain to be defined. Abundant evidence suggests that nitric oxide (NO) and one of its primary...

Mitochondrial respiration was altered in transgenic potato (Solanum tuberosum) lines by overexpression of the alternative oxidase Aox1 gene. Overexpressing lines showed higher levels of Aox1 mRNA, increased levels of alternative oxidase protein(s), and an unusual higher molecular weight polypeptide, which may be a normal processing/modification intermediate. Evidence suggests that the alternati...

Wetland grasses and grass-like monocots are very important natural remediators of pollutants. Their genetic improvement is an important task because introduction of key transgenes can dramatically improve their remediation potential. Tissue culture is prerequisite for genetic manipulation, and methods are reported here for in vitro culture and micropropagation of a number of wetland plants of v...