Evolutionary history of a Scottish harbour seal population.

Efforts to conserve marine mammals are often constrained by uncertainty over their population history. Here, we examine the evolutionary history of a harbour seal () population in the Moray Firth, northeast Scotland using genetic tools and microsatellite markers to explore population change. Previous fine-scale analysis of UK harbour seal populations revealed three clusters in the UK, with a northeastern cluster that included our Moray Firth study population.

Comparative study of statistical methods for detecting association with rare variants in exome-resequencing data.

Genome-wide association studies for complex traits are based on the common disease/common variant (CDCV) and common disease/rare variant (CDRV) assumptions. Under the CDCV hypothesis, classical genome-wide association studies using single-marker tests are powerful in detecting common susceptibility variants, but under the CDRV hypothesis they are not as powerful. Several methods have been recently proposed to detect association with multiple rare variants collectively in a functional unit such as a gene.

Comparative transcriptome and network biology analyses demonstrate antiproliferative and hyperapoptotic phenotypes in human keratoconus corneas.

Purpose: To decipher the biological pathways involved in keratoconus pathophysiology by determining the patterns of differential gene expression between keratoconus and control corneas.

Methods: RNA was extracted from surgically removed corneas of 10 keratoconus patients and from normal corneas of 10 control patients who had undergone enucleation of an eye for ocular melanoma. Several hundred thousand RNA transcripts were assessed using exon microarrays.

A highly polymorphic insertion in the Y-chromosome amelogenin gene can be used for evolutionary biology, population genetics and sexing in Cetacea and Artiodactyla.

Background: The early radiation of the Cetartiodactyla is complex, and unambiguous molecular characters are needed to clarify the positions of hippotamuses, camels and pigs relative to the remaining taxa (Cetacea and Ruminantia). There is also a need for informative genealogic markers for Y-chromosome population genetics as well as a sexing method applicable to all species from this group. We therefore studied the sequence variation of a partial sequence of the evolutionary conserved amelogenin gene to assess its potential use in each of these fields.