Actin is a major component of the cytoskeleton and one of the most abundant proteins found in eukaryotic cells. Comparative sequence analysis shows that this essential gene has been highly conserved throughout eukaryotic evolution making it useful for phylogenetic analysis. Complete cDNA clones for the actin-encoding gene were isolated and characterized from Pneumocystis carinii purified from i...

The proliferation of malwares have been attributed to the alternations of the original malware source codes. The malwares alternated from the same origin share some intrinsic behaviors and form a malware family. Expediently, identifying its malware family when a malware is first seen can provide useful clues to mitigating the threat. In this paper, a malware profiler (VMP) is proposed to profil...

Various structure-function relationships regarding drought-induced cavitation resistance of secondary xylem have been postulated. These hypotheses were tested on wood of 10 Prunus species showing a range in P50 (i.e., the pressure corresponding to 50% loss of hydraulic conductivity) from -3.54 to -6.27 MPa. Hydraulically relevant wood characters were quantified using light and electron microsco...

Sudden oak death has been an emerging disease problem in coastal California and has caused significant losses in forest ecosystems in some regions of the state. The causal agent of this disease has been described as Phytophthora ramorum with two other less aggressive species, P. nemorosa and P. pseudosyringae, recovered from some symptomatic plants. The phylogenetic relationship of these specie...

The monophyletic group Caniformia (dog-like carnivores) in the order Carnivora comprises 9 families. Except for the general consensus for the earliest divergence of Canidae and the grouping of Procyonidae and Mustelidae, conflicting phylogenetic hypotheses exist for the other caniformian families. In the present study, a data set comprising > 22 kb of 22 nuclear intron loci from 16 caniformian ...

To estimate the evolutionary history of the mustard family (Brassicaceae or Cruciferae), we sampled 113 species, representing 101 of the roughly 350 genera and 17 of the 19 tribes of the family, for the chloroplast gene ndhF. The included accessions increase the number of genera sampled over previous phylogenetic studies by four-fold. Using parsimony, likelihood, and Bayesian methods, we recons...

The current decrease of new drugs brought to the market has fostered renewed interest in plant-based drug discovery. Given the alarming rate of biodiversity loss, systematic methodologies in finding new plant-derived drugs are urgently needed. Medicinal uses of plants were proposed as proxy for bioactivity, and phylogenetic patterns in medicinal plant uses have suggested that phylogeny can be u...

This study analysed phylogenetic evidence of recombination in sequences of hepatitis A virus (HAV) available in international databases. Isolation of distinct recombinant HAV strains has been reported previously; however, the prevalence of natural recombination and its role in HAV genetics remains obscure. Analysis of full genome sequences revealed evidence of common intratypic recombination am...