Search results for "SELECTION"
showing 10 items of 1940 documents
Evidence of gene orthology and trans-species polymorphism, but not of parallel evolution, despite high levels of concerted evolution in the major his…
2016
17 pages; International audience; The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a cornerstone in the study of adaptive genetic diversity. Intriguingly, highly polymorphic MHC sequences are often not more similar within species than between closely related species. Divergent selection of gene duplicates, balancing selection maintaining trans-species polymorphism (TSP) that predate speciation and parallel evolution of species sharing similar selection pressures can all lead to higher sequence similarity between species. In contrast, high rates of concerted evolution increase sequence similarity of duplicated loci within species. Assessing these evolutionary models remains difficult as related…
Penalized classification for optimal statistical selection of markers from high-throughput genotyping: application in sheep breeds
2018
The identification of individuals’ breed of origin has several practical applications in livestock and is useful in different biological contexts such as conservation genetics, breeding and authentication of animal products. In this paper, penalized multinomial regression was applied to identify the minimum number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from high-throughput genotyping data for individual assignment to dairy sheep breeds reared in Sicily. The combined use of penalized multinomial regression and stability selection reduced the number of SNPs required to 48. A final validation step on an independent population was carried out obtaining 100% correctly classified individuals. …
Current concepts in the prevention of pathogen transmission via blood/plasma-derived products for bleeding disorders
2015
The pathogen safety of blood/plasma-derived products has historically been a subject of significant concern to the medical community, Measures such as donor selection and blood screening have contributed to increase the safety of these products, but pathogen transmission does still occur. Reasons for this include lack of sensitivity/specificity of current screening methods, lack of reliable screening tests for some pathogens (e.g. prions) and the fact that many potentially harmful infectious agents are not routinely screened for. Methods for the purification/inactivation of blood/plasma-derived products have been developed in order to further reduce the residual risk, but low concentrations…
Assessment of Muscular Fitness as a Predictor of Flight Duty Limitation.
2018
Introduction The high acceleration (Gz) exposure among military pilots flying fighter aircraft has been associated with an increased risk for cervical and lumbar disorders. It has been suggested that an adequate level of physical performance could reduce the risk of experiencing these disorders. The Finnish Air Force has for several years used aerobic (bicycle ergometer) and muscular fitness tests (battery of five tests) in the selection process of military pilot candidates in order to evaluate their physical fitness level. The aim of the study was to determine if these selection phase tests and anthropometry measures can predispose those individuals who might be at risk of developing sever…
2021
Scholarly journals are often blamed for a gender gap in publication rates, but it is unclear whether peer review and editorial processes contribute to it. This article examines gender bias in peer review with data for 145 journals in various fields of research, including about 1.7 million authors and 740,000 referees. We reconstructed three possible sources of bias, i.e., the editorial selection of referees, referee recommendations, and editorial decisions, and examined all their possible relationships. Results showed that manuscripts written by women as solo authors or coauthored by women were treated even more favorably by referees and editors. Although there were some differences between…
Comparison of CRISPR and marker based methods for the engineering of phage T7
2020
With the recent rise in interest in using lytic bacteriophages as therapeutic agents, there is an urgent requirement to understand their fundamental biology to enable the engineering of their genomes. Current methods of phage engineering rely on homologous recombination, followed by a system of selection to identify recombinant phages. For bacteriophage T7, the host genescmkortrxhave been used as a selection mechanism along with both type I and II CRISPR systems to select against wild-type phage and enrich for the desired mutant. Here we systematically compare all three systems; we show that the use of marker-based selection is the most efficient method and we use this to generate multiple …
Low-cost scalable discretization, prediction and feature selection for complex systems
2019
The introduced data-driven tool allows simultaneous feature selection, model inference, and marked cost and quality gains.
Do fee-shifting rules affect plaintiffs’ win rates? A theoretical and empirical analysis
2021
Abstract This article studies whether fee-shifting rules can affect plaintiffs’ win rates. Beyond theoretical modeling, this study goes a step further and provides empirical evidence on this issue, thanks to the study of a real change in Spanish legislation. Spain applied the so-called English rule in 2011 in the administrative jurisdiction. This study explores whether plaintiffs were more or less successful when litigating against public administrations since then. After controlling for several other factors, it is shown that the new rule considerably increased plaintiffs’ win rate (while also reducing litigation). The paper also presents a theoretical model explaining that the English rul…
Evaluating a hierarchical approach to landscape-level harvest scheduling
2018
Forest planning at the landscape level has the potential to become a large intractable problem. In Finland, Metsähallitus (the state enterprise that manages federally owned land) creates strategic plans to determine the appropriate harvest level. While these plans are feasible, they are not implementable in practice as the harvests are scattered temporally and spatially. Requiring that harvests be organized both temporally and spatially for practical implementation can result in an intractable problem. Through a hierarchical approach, the problem can be organized into steps in which the intractable problem is broken down into smaller easily solvable parts. As an approximation technique, th…
The ontogenetic evolution of verbal behavior
2020
Behavior interacts with its environment both during an organism’s lifetime and across generations through natural selection. Speech is a natural event that comes down to sounds that affect the beha...