Less than one fourth of physicians specializing in geriatrics, internal or family medicine or cardiology believe they can accurately predict whether patients with heart failure are at risk of dying, new Saint Louis University research found.
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The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, claims to have solved this scientific riddle by analysing the genomics of primitive living fishes such as sharks and lampreys and their spineless relatives, such as the sea squirts.
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Six forms of spinal cerebellar ataxia (SCA1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 17) are caused by dominant mutations in the respective genes. Patients suffering from these different forms of SCA have similar symptoms of progressive adult-onset neurodegeneration, and the same causative mutation, a CAG repeat expansion encoding an expanded run of polyglutamine.
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Biologists are developing ever more sophisticated means to characterize molecular interactions in living systems. But a new study suggests that many of the interactions detected by a widely-used experimental method are functionally irrelevant.
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Plant-animal mutualisms are characterized by weak or asymmetric mutual dependences between interacting species, such that if a plant species depends strongly on an animal species, the animal typically depends weakly on the plant, and vice versa.