0000000000144029
AUTHOR
M. Kirchner
Absence of the lactase-persistence-associated allele in early Neolithic Europeans.
Lactase persistence (LP), the dominant Mendelian trait conferring the ability to digest the milk sugar lactose in adults, has risen to high frequency in central and northern Europeans in the last 20,000 years. This trait is likely to have conferred a selective advantage in individuals who consume appreciable amounts of unfermented milk. Some have argued for the “culture-historical hypothesis,” whereby LP alleles were rare until the advent of dairying early in the Neolithic but then rose rapidly in frequency under natural selection. Others favor the “reverse cause hypothesis,” whereby dairying was adopted in populations with preadaptive high LP allele frequencies. Analysis based on the cons…
Surface investigation of plasma HMDSO membranes post-treated by CF4/Ar plasma
Fluorination treatment has been performed on polysiloxane membranes using a plasma glow discharge of a gases mixture CF4 and argon (plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition). Atomic force microscopy, XPS analyses and contact angle measurements have been undertaken to explain the surface transformation and behavior, which strongly depend on the morphology, the composition and the hydrophilic/hydrophobic character of the plasma-polymerized initial membranes. Main result is that fluorination, which leads to hydrophobic membranes, has a more relevant effect on amorphous silica-like membranes than on polymer-like ones, according to their chemical composition whereas the plasma surface reaction …
Principal component analysis and cluster analysis for measuring the local organisation of human atrial fibrillation
The distribution of atrial electrogram types has been proposed to characterise human atrial fibrillation. The aim of this study was to provide computer procedures for evaluating the local organisation of intracardiac recordings during AF as an alternative to off-line manual classification. Principal components analysis (PCA) reduced the data set to a few representative activations, and cluster analysis (CA) measured the average dissimilarity between consecutive activations of an intracardiac signal. The data set consisted of 106 bipolar signals recorded on 11 patients during electrophysiological studies for catheter ablation. Performances of PCA and CA in distinguishing between organised (t…
Local electrical characterisation of human atrial fibrillation
The rate of success of radio-frequency catheter ablation in the treatment of atrial fibrillation may be significantly improved by evaluating the local electrical properties of the atrial tissue. The aim of this study is the development of an automatic procedure for the characterisation of the local electrical activity during atrial fibrillation and the comparison of its performance with the manual analysis. The adopted procedures were the semi-automatic measurement of the local fibrillation intervals (A-A intervals) and the manual electrogram classification following the criteria suggested by Wells (1978) or Konings (1997). Two methods have been used: Principal Component Analysis and Cluste…