The genetic diversity and differentiation of three Chinese Bruguiera gymnorrhiza populations was examined in this study: Expected heterozygosity at species and population levels was 0.293 and 0.268, observed heterozygosity was 0.2745 and 0.2705, respectively. The genetic diversity between populations was 0.0830, which showed that among total heterozygosity, 8.3% came from inter-population. Gene...

Cancer results from the acquisition of somatic alterations in a microevolutionary process that typically occurs over many years, much of which is occult. Understanding the evolutionary dynamics that are operative at different stages of progression in individual tumors might inform the earlier detection, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. Although these processes cannot be directly observed, th...

Within-population genetic diversity is greatest within Africa, while between-population genetic diversity is directly proportional to geographic distance. The most divergent contemporary human populations include the click-speaking forager peoples of southern Africa, broadly defined as Khoesan. Both intra- (Bantu expansion) and inter-continental migration (European-driven colonization) have res...

Assessing genetic diversity within populations is vital for understanding the nature of evolutionary processes at the molecular level. PGEToolbox is a Matlab-based open-sourced software package for data analysis in population genetics. The main features of this software are as follows: 1) capability for handling both DNA sequence polymorphisms and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which i...

questions. The most obvious is, why do female guppies prefer males with uncommon colour patterns? Here we have more hypotheses than data sets. One theoretical analysis suggests that greater survival of rare male types, which has been found in guppies, might contribute to the evolution of such a preference, even if it is costly. Interestingly, the same analysis points out that the negative feedb...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Standard population genetic theory says that deleterious genetic variants are likely rare and fairly recently introduced. However, can this expectation lead to more powerful tests of association between diseases and rare genetic variation? The gene genealogy describes the relationships between haplotypes sampled from the general population. Although ancestral tree-based...

What allows some species to successfully colonize a novel environment while others fail? Numerous studies in invasion biology have sought to answer this question, but those studies have tended to focus on traits of species or individuals (e.g. body size, seed size, seed number), and these traits have largely been found to be weak predictors of invasion success. However, characteristics of colon...

The effect of environment on adaptation and divergence was examined in two sets of populations of Escherichia coli selected for 1000 generations in either maltose-or glucose-limited media. Twelve replicate populations selected in maltose-limited medium improved in fitness in the selected environment, by an average of 22.5%. Statistically significant among-population genetic variation for fitnes...

Six Iranian populations have been analyzed for finger patterns, utilizing bilateral prints of 720 individuals. Bimanual and sex differences were frequently insignificant and non-significant. Interpopulational variation showed significant hetererogeneity among the populations studied. Distance analysis and constructed dendrograms, based on these six populations and other thirteen Iranian populat...

Population founding and spatial spread may profoundly influence later population genetic structure, but their effects are difficult to quantify when population history is unknown. We examined the genetic effects of founder group formation in a recently founded population of the animal-dispersed Vaccinium membranaceum (black huckleberry) on new volcanic deposits at Mount St Helens (Washington, U...