Over the past several weeks the health news has been dominated by the outbreak of infections by Ebola virus (EBOV) in several West African nations: Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria. A study (Gire et al., 2014) published online at the end of August and now...
Altshuler and colleagues (Nature Genetics, 2014) recently reported a study of about 150,000 individuals representing five different ancestral groups in which they identified twelve low-frequency variants of the gene SLC30A8 through either genomic sequencing or...
Epistasis refers to the influence of one genomic mutation or variant on the phenotypic effects of another mutation or variant. Based on available evidence and theory, this phenomenon has a major influence on evolutionary trajectories for organisms of all...
Toxoplasma gondii is an intracellular protozoan parasite that infects many different vertebrate species asexually and undergoes a sexual cycle after infecting cats (http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxoplasmosis/, 2013). Parasite oocysts are potentially introduced...
A prion is a protein that can adopt a conformation other than the ‘standard’ functional conformation and this alternative conformation favors self-association. The aggregation-associated conformation can then be imposed on additional copies of the protein in the...
