SUMMARY: Synucleins are small, soluble proteins expressed primarily in neural tissue and in certain tumors. The family includes three known proteins: alpha-synuclein, beta-synuclein, and gamma-synuclein. All synucleins ...

Four influenza pandemics have struck the human population during the last 100 years causing substantial morbidity and mortality. The pandemics were caused by the introduction of a new virus into the human population from ...

Nonhomogeneous Markov models of nucleotide substitution have received scant attention. Here we explore the possibility of using nonhomogeneous models to identify host shift nodes along phylogenetic trees of pathogens ...

Bayesian methods provide a powerful way to estimate species divergence times by combining information from molecular sequences with information from the fossil record. With the explosive increase of genomic data, divergence ...

O'Leary et al. (O'Leary et al. 2013 Science 339, 662-667. (doi:10.1126/science.1229237)) performed a fossil-only dating analysis of mammals, concluding that the ancestor of placentals post-dated the Cretaceous-Palaeogene ...

Estimation of the distribution of selection coefficients of mutations is a long-standing issue in molecular evolution. In addition to population-based methods, the distribution can be estimated from DNA sequence data by ...

Immunization with the vOka vaccine prevents varicella (chickenpox) in children and susceptible adults. The vOka vaccine strain comprises a mixture of genotypes and, despite attenuation, causes rashes in small numbers of ...

Phylogeographic analysis can be described as the study of the geological and climatological processes that have produced contemporary geographic distributions of populations and species. Here, we attempt to understand how ...

The natural reservoir of Influenza A is waterfowl. Normally, waterfowl viruses are not adapted to infect and spread in the human population. Sometimes, through reassortment or through whole host shift events, genetic ...