Why, so far, have epidemics always eventually petered out? Quasispecies theory suggests a (testable!) answer.

In this paper, it is argued that the fact that, so far, even the worst and most far-reaching epidemics-from the Plague of Athens in 430 BC and the Plague of Justinian in 541/542 AD to the Hong Kong Flu from 1968/69-always finally petered out can be explained using Manfred Eigen's quasispecies concept: Indeed, as the infectious agents, while duplicating themselves in the infected organisms, mutate all the time, these infected organisms carry along quite a multitude of mutational variants or-in Manfred Eigen's terms-a whole quasispecies of infectious agents implying that, within that quasispecies, those variants that differ from the wild type may actually serve as some kind of vaccination program when infecting some previously uninfected persons. In this context, some data regarding various recent epidemics will also be illustrated, using Daniel Huson's SplitsTree software tool.

MiR-34a modulates ErbB2 in breast cancer.

Breast cancer is the second highest cause of carcinoma-related death caused by distant metastasis in women. Estrogen receptor (ER), human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, (HER2) and progesterone receptor (PR) are three classified makers of breast cancer, which are defined as ER+, HER2+, and the most serious ER-PR-HER2- (triple-negative). It is well known that ErbB2 (V-Erb-B2 avian erythroblastic leukemia viral oncogene homolog 2) plays an important part in breast cancer.

Pulmonary Vascular Distensibility Predicts Pulmonary Hypertension Severity, Exercise Capacity, and Survival in Heart Failure.

Background: Pulmonary vascular (PV) distensibility, defined as the percent increase in pulmonary vessel diameter per mm Hg increase in pressure, permits the pulmonary vessels to increase in size to accommodate increased blood flow. We hypothesized that PV distensibility is abnormally low in patients with heart failure (HF) and serves as an important determinant of right ventricular performance and exercise capacity.

Methods And Results: Patients with HF with preserved ejection fraction (n=48), HF with reduced ejection fraction (n=55), pulmonary arterial hypertension without left heart failure (n=18), and control subjects (n=30) underwent cardiopulmonary exercise testing with invasive hemodynamic monitoring and first-pass radionuclide ventriculography.

miR-195 inhibits tumor growth and angiogenesis through modulating IRS1 in breast cancer.

Angiogenesis has been found as an attractive target for drug therapy as it is necessary for tumor growth. Accumulating evidences show that microRNAs (miRNAs), which are a group of highly conserved, single-stranded, short non-coding RNAs, play important roles through directly targeting angiogenic factors and protein kinases. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of miR-195 in breast cancer development and angiogenesis through targeting IRS1.

Behavioral Benefits of Camel Milk in Subjects with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Objective: To investigate the possible therapeutic effects of camel milk on behavioral characteristics as an interventional strategy in autistic children.

Study Design: Double-blind, Randomized Clinical Trial (RCT).

Place And Duration Of Study: Autism Research and Treatment Center, Al-Amodi Autism Research Chair, Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, King Khalid University Hospital, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from October 2012 to May 2013.

Lower Wingate Test Power Outcomes From "All-Out" Pretest Pedaling Cadence Compared With Moderate Cadence.

The aim of the present study was to determine the effect of different pretest pedaling cadences on power outcomes obtained during the Wingate Anaerobic Test (WAnT). Vigorously exercising adult men (n = 14, 24.9 ± 1.

Fermat's principle of least time predicts refraction of ant trails at substrate borders.

Fermat's principle of least time states that light rays passing through different media follow the fastest (and not the most direct) path between two points, leading to refraction at medium borders. Humans intuitively employ this rule, e.g.

Ultrametric networks: a new tool for phylogenetic analysis.

Background: The large majority of optimization problems related to the inference of distance-based trees used in phylogenetic analysis and classification is known to be intractable. One noted exception is found within the realm of ultrametric distances. The introduction of ultrametric trees in phylogeny was inspired by a model of evolution driven by the postulate of a molecular clock, now dismissed, whereby phylogeny could be represented by a weighted tree in which the sum of the weights of the edges separating any given leaf from the root is the same for all leaves.

MiR-145 inhibits tumor angiogenesis and growth by N-RAS and VEGF.

MiR-145 is known as a tumor suppressor in numerous human cancers. However, its role in tumor angiogenesis remains poorly defined. In this study, we found that miR-145 was significantly downregulated in breast cancer tissues by using 106 cases of normal and cancer tissues as well as in breast cancer cells.

'Lassoing' a phylogenetic tree I: basic properties, shellings, and covers.

A classical result, fundamental to evolutionary biology, states that an edge-weighted tree T with leaf set X, positive edge weights, and no vertices of degree 2 can be uniquely reconstructed from the leaf-to-leaf distances between any two elements of X. In biology, X corresponds to a set of taxa (e.g.

Analysis of MiR-195 and MiR-497 expression, regulation and role in breast cancer.

Purpose: To investigate expression, regulation, potential role and targets of miR-195 and miR-497 in breast cancer.

Experimental Design: The expression patterns of miR-195 and miR-497 were initially examined in breast cancer tissues and cell lines by Northern blotting and quantitative real-time PCR. Combined bisulfite restriction analysis and bisulfite sequencing were carried out to study the DNA methylation status of miR-195 and miR-497 genes.

Towards prediction and prioritization of disease genes by the modularity of human phenome-genome assembled network.

Empirical clinical studies on the human interactome and phenome not only illustrates prevalent phenotypic overlap and genetic overlap between diseases, but also reveals a modular organization of the genetic landscape of human disease, providing new opportunities to reduce the complexity in dissecting the phenotype-genotype association. We here introduce a network-module based method towards phenotype-genotype association inference and disease gene identification. This approach incorporates protein-protein interaction network, phenotype similarity network and known phenotype-genotype associations into an assembled network.

Efficient tools for comparative substring analysis.

This paper introduces an efficient implementation of approaches to alignment-free comparative genome analysis and genome-based phylogeny relying on substring composition. Distances derived from substring statistics have been proposed recently as a meaningful alternative to distances derived from sequence alignment. In particular, procaryote phylogenies based on comparative 5- and 6-mer analysis of whole proteomes have successfully been worked out.

Species, clusters and the 'Tree of life': a graph-theoretic perspective.

A hierarchical structure describing the inter-relationships of species has long been a fundamental concept in systematic biology, from Linnean classification through to the more recent quest for a 'Tree of Life'. In this paper we use an approach based on discrete mathematics to address a basic question: could one delineate this hierarchical structure in nature purely by reference to the 'genealogy' of present-day individuals, which describes how they are related with one another by ancestry through a continuous line of descent? We describe several mathematically precise ways by which one can naturally define collections of subsets of present day individuals so that these subsets are nested (and so form a tree) based purely on the directed graph that describes the ancestry of these individuals. We also explore the relationship between these and related clustering constructions.

An information theoretic thresholding method for detecting protein colocalizations in stacks of fluorescence images.

In this note, we present a new method that allows us to determine threshold values for separating presence and absence of proteins in a stack of fluorescence images describing a spatial distribution of proteins across a biological object (like a slice of nervous tissue, a sample of blood cells, etc.). We apply this method to stacks of fluorescence images and find that the resulting threshold values are almost identical with threshold values found using completely independent methods based on technological and biological aspects of the images in question.

Detection of local community structures in complex dynamic networks with random walks.

Identification of interaction patterns in complex networks via community structures has gathered a lot of attention in recent research studies. Local community structures provide a better measure to understand and visualise the nature of interaction when the global knowledge of networks is unknown. Recent research on local community structures, however, lacks the feature to adjust itself in the dynamic networks and heavily depends on the source vertex position.

Stability of multiple alignments and phylogenetic trees: an analysis of ABC-transporter proteins family.

Background: Sequence-based phylogeny reconstruction is a fundamental task in Bioinformatics. Practically all methods for phylogeny reconstruction are based on multiple alignments. The quality and stability of the underlying alignments is therefore crucial for phylogenetic analysis.

Noisy: identification of problematic columns in multiple sequence alignments.

Motivation: Sequence-based methods for phylogenetic reconstruction from (nucleic acid) sequence data are notoriously plagued by two effects: homoplasies and alignment errors. Large evolutionary distances imply a large number of homoplastic sites. As most protein-coding genes show dramatic variations in substitution rates that are not uncorrelated across the sequence, this often leads to a patchwork pattern of (i) phylogenetically informative and (ii) effectively randomized regions.

Checking the reliability of a linear-programming based approach towards detecting community structures in networks.

Here, the reliability of a recent approach to use parameterised linear programming for detecting community structures in network has been investigated. Using a one-parameter family of objective functions, a number of "perturbation experiments' document that our approach works rather well. A real-life network and a family of benchmark network are also analysed.

Mirror syndrome resulting from metastatic congenital neuroblastoma.

Neuroblastoma is a tumor of the sympathetic ganglia and adrenal medulla that rarely metastasizes to the placenta. A 21-year-old gravida 3, para 1 at 28 weeks' gestation had an incidental finding of a 3.8-cm fetal renal mass on prenatal ultrasound.

QNet: an agglomerative method for the construction of phylogenetic networks from weighted quartets.

We present QNet, a method for constructing split networks from weighted quartet trees. QNet can be viewed as a quartet analogue of the distance-based Neighbor-Net (NNet) method for network construction. Just as NNet, QNet works by agglomeratively computing a collection of circular weighted splits of the taxa set which is subsequently represented by a planar split network.

Constructing splits graphs.

Phylogenetic trees correspond one-to-one to compatible systems of splits and so splits play an important role in theoretical and computational aspects of phylogeny. Whereas any tree reconstruction method can be thought of as producing a compatible system of splits, an increasing number of phylogenetic algorithms are available that compute split systems that are not necessarily compatible and, thus, cannot always be represented by a tree. Such methods include the split decomposition, Neighbor-Net, consensus networks, and the Z-closure method.

Analyzing proteome topology and function by automated multidimensional fluorescence microscopy.

Temporal and spatial regulation of proteins contributes to function. We describe a multidimensional microscopic robot technology for high-throughput protein colocalization studies that runs cycles of fluorescence tagging, imaging and bleaching in situ. This technology combines three advances: a fluorescence technique capable of mapping hundreds of different proteins in one tissue section or cell sample; a method selecting the most prominent combinatorial molecular patterns by representing the data as binary vectors; and a system for imaging the distribution of these protein clusters in a so-called toponome map.