A major problem confronting physicians, nurses, and other hospital personnel is transmission of pathogens among inpatients or between medical personnel and inpatients (in either direction). A crucial component in efforts to control such infectious outbreaks in...
A paper recently appearing in Science (Näsvall et al. 2012) offers a new insights into the mechanisms by which gene duplication can lead to new genes, gene products, and functions. The new scheme is termed the innovation-amplification-divergence (IAD) model. The...
Influenza A viruses continue to be of enormous interest to biomedical researchers and clinicians alike. In addition to the annual influenza epidemics, which have been inferred to cause substantial excess mortality, there is the ever-present threat of a global...
There have been claims that variations in the composition of the intestinal flora influence individual health going back at least to the early years of the 1900s. Late in his career, Ilya Mechnikov, co-receipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1908...
The new tools for determining nucleotide sequences for whole genomes can sometimes present a problem of data analysis: How can mutations that influence important phenotypes be distinguished from mutations that may be of minimal or no impact on fitness, so-called...
