Higher variability in the number of sexual partners in males can contribute to a higher prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases in females.

By examining published, empirical data we show that men and women consistently differ in the shape of the distribution of the number of sexual partners. The female distribution is always relatively narrow-variance is low-with a big majority of women having a number of partners close to the average. The male distribution is much wider-variance is high-with many men having few sex partners and many others having more partners than most females.

InterMap3D: predicting and visualizing co-evolving protein residues.

Summary: InterMap3D predicts co-evolving protein residues and plots them on the 3D protein structure. Starting with a single protein sequence, InterMap3D automatically finds a set of homologous sequences, generates an alignment and fetches the most similar 3D structure from the Protein Data Bank (PDB). It can also accept a user-generated alignment.

Phylogenetic relationships between Sarcocystis species from reindeer and other Sarcocystidae deduced from ssu rRNA gene sequences.

Six Sarcocystis species from reindeer (S. grueneri, S. rangi, S.

Finding coevolving amino acid residues using row and column weighting of mutual information and multi-dimensional amino acid representation.

Background: Some amino acid residues functionally interact with each other. This interaction will result in an evolutionary co-variation between these residues - coevolution. Our goal is to find these coevolving residues.

MaxAlign: maximizing usable data in an alignment.

Background: The presence of gaps in an alignment of nucleotide or protein sequences is often an inconvenience for bioinformatical studies. In phylogenetic and other analyses, for instance, gapped columns are often discarded entirely from the alignment.

Results: MaxAlign is a program that optimizes the alignment prior to such analyses.

Molecular and epidemiological study on nosocomial transmission of HCV in hemodialysis patients in Brazil.

An epidemiological and molecular study of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection was carried out in Brazilian hemodialysis centers. A total of 1,095 patients in all 15 hemodialysis centers in the State of Goiás, Brazil, were studied. All patients were interviewed for possible risk factors to HCV infection and serum samples tested for anti-HCV by ELISA and for HCV RNA by nested RT-PCR of the 5' NC region.

Comparative evaluation of word composition distances for the recognition of SCOP relationships.

Motivation: Alignment-free metrics were recently reviewed by the authors, but have not until now been object of a comparative study. This paper compares the classification accuracy of word composition metrics therein reviewed. It also presents a new distance definition between protein sequences, the W-metric, which bridges between alignment metrics, such as scores produced by the Smith-Waterman algorithm, and methods based solely in L-tuple composition, such as Euclidean distance and Information content.

EURISWEB--Web-based epidemiological surveillance of antibiotic-resistant pneumococci in day care centers.

Background: EURIS (European Resistance Intervention Study) was launched as a multinational study in September of 2000 to identify the multitude of complex risk factors that contribute to the high carriage rate of drug resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae strains in children attending Day Care Centers in several European countries. Access to the very large number of data required the development of a web-based infrastructure - EURISWEB - that includes a relational online database, coupled with a query system for data retrieval, and allows integrative storage of demographic, clinical and molecular biology data generated in EURIS.

Methods: All components of the system were developed using open source programming tools: data storage management was supported by PostgreSQL, and the hypertext preprocessor to generate the web pages was implemented using PHP.