Autosomal resequence data reveal Late Stone Age signals of population expansion in sub-Saharan African foraging and farming populations.

Background: A major unanswered question in the evolution of Homo sapiens is when anatomically modern human populations began to expand: was demographic growth associated with the invention of particular technologies or behavioral innovations by hunter-gatherers in the Late Pleistocene, or with the acquisition of farming in the Neolithic?

Methodology/principal Findings: We investigate the timing of human population expansion by performing a multilocus analysis of > or = 20 unlinked autosomal noncoding regions, each consisting of approximately 6 kilobases, resequenced in approximately 184 individuals from 7 human populations. We test the hypothesis that the autosomal polymorphism data fit a simple two-phase growth model, and when the hypothesis is not rejected, we fit parameters of this model to our data using approximate Bayesian computation.

Conclusions/significance: The data from the three surveyed non-African populations (French Basque, Chinese Han, and Melanesians) are inconsistent with the simple growth model, presumably because they reflect more complex demographic histories.

Multiplexed screening assay for mRNA combining nuclease protection with luminescent array detection.

The principles and performance are described for the ArrayPlate mRNA assay, a multiplexed mRNA assay for high-throughput and high-content screening and drug development. THP-1 monocytes grown and subjected to compound treatments in 96-well plates were subjected to a multiplexed nuclease protection assay in situ. The nuclease protection assay destroyed all cell-derived mRNA, but left intact stoichiometric amounts of 16 target-specific oligonucleotide probes.