This is a lively and engaging look at the factors, known as `artifacts', that can confound behavioural experiments. By describing key research studies in a narrative style, Rosnow and Rosenthal address the issues of scientific method and clarify the difficulties that behavioural researchers will encounter. Their final chapter addresses ethical issues, again through narrative use of examples.

BACKGROUND: The Master Catalog is a collection of evolutionary families, including multiple sequence alignments, phylogenetic trees and reconstructed ancestral sequences, for all protein-sequence modules encoded by genes in GenBank. It can therefore support large-scale genomic surveys, of which we present here The Adaptive Evolution Database (TAED). In TAED, potential examples of positive adaptation are identified by high values for the normalized ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous nucleotide substitution rates (KA/KS values) on branches of an evolutionary tree between nodes representing reconstructed ancestral sequences. RESULTS: Evolutionary trees and reconstructed ancestral sequences were extracted from the Master Catalog for every subtree containing proteins from the Chordata only or the Embryophyta only. Branches with high KA/KS values were identified. These represent candidate episodes in the history of the protein family when the protein may have undergone positive selection, where the mutant form conferred more fitness than the ancestral form. Such episodes are frequently associated with change in function. An unexpectedly large number of families (between 10% and 20% of those families examined) were found to have at least one branch with high KA/KS values above arbitrarily chosen cut-offs (1 and 0.6). Most of these survived a robustness test and were collected into TAED. CONCLUSIONS: TAED is a raw resource for bioinformaticists interested in data mining and for experimental evolutionists seeking candidate examples of adaptive evolution for further experimental study. It can be expanded to include other evolutionary information (for example changes in gene regulation or splicing) placed in a phylogenetic perspective.

A report on the 18th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), Aarhus, Denmark, 20-25 August, 2001.

The proteome is the complete set of proteins in an organism. It is considerably larger and more complex than the genome - the collection of genes that encodes these proteins. Proteomics deals with the qualitative and quantitative study of the proteome under physiological and pathological conditions (e.g., after exposure to alcohol, which causes major changes in numerous proteins of different cell types). To map large proteomes such as the human proteome, proteins from discrete tissues, cells, cell components, or biological fluids are first separated by high-resolution two-dimensional electrophoresis and multidimensional liquid chromatography. Then, individual proteins are identified by mass spectrometry. The huge amount of data acquired using these techniques is analyzed and assembled by fast computers and bioinformatics tools. Using these methods, as well as other technological advances, alcohol researchers can gain a better understanding of how alcohol globally influences protein structure and function, protein-protein interactions, and protein networks. This knowledge ultimately will assist in the early diagnosis and prognosis of alcoholism and the discovery of new drug targets and medications for treatment.

On paper, South African law concerning detention of asylum seekers appears consistent with international standards. However, the text of the Act is vague and overly broad, permitting interpretations inconsistent with international human rights standards. Further, in practice, officials often fail to uphold even the lowest standards of the Act, in violation of South African law. In order to protect the rights of asylum seekers, the South African government should institute formal guidelines and training programs, as well as a system of strong supervision and accountability, to ensure that the Act and Regulations are interpreted in a manner consistent with international law. Such a step will enable South Africa to live up to its noble post-apartheid human rights ideals.

Background: Members of the ribonuclease III superfamily of double-stranded(ds)-RNA-specific endoribonucleases participate in diverse RNA maturation and decay pathways in eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells. A human RNase III orthologue has been implicated in ribosomal RNA maturation. To better understand the structure and mechanism of mammalian RNase III and its involvement in RNA metabolism we determined the cDNA structure, chromosomal location, and expression patterns of mouse RNase III. Results: The predicted mouse RNase III polypeptide contains 1373 amino acids (∼160 kDa). The polypeptide exhibits a single C-terminal dsRNA-binding motif (dsRBM), tandem catalytic domains, a proline-rich region (PRR) and an RS domain. Northern analysis and RT-PCR reveal that the transcript (4487 nt) is expressed in all tissues examined, including extraembryonic tissues and the midgestation embryo. Northern analysis indicates the presence of an additional, shorter form of the transcript in testicular tissue. Fluorescent in situ hybridization demonstrates that the mouse RNase III gene maps to chromosome 15, region B, and that the human RNase III gene maps to a syntenic location on chromosome 5p13-p14. Conclusions: The broad transcript expression pattern indicates a conserved cellular role(s) for mouse RNase III. The putative polypeptide is highly similar to human RNase III (99% amino acid sequence identity for the two catalytic domains and dsRBM), but is distinct from other eukaryotic orthologues, including Dicer, which is involved in RNA interference. The mouse RNase III gene has a chromosomal location distinct from the Dicer gene. © 2002 Fortin et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

A report on the fourth annual conference of the Society for Bioinformatics in the Nordic Countries (SOCBIN), Bioinformatics 2002, Bergen, Norway, 4-7 April 2002.

Background: Distributions of time estimates in molecular clock studies are sometimes skewed or contain outliers. In those cases, the mode is a better estimator of the overall time of divergence than the mean or median. However, different methods are available for estimating the mode. We compared these methods in simulations to determine their strengths and weaknesses and further assessed their performance when applied to real data sets from a molecular clock study. Results: We found that the half-range mode and robust parametric mode methods have a lower bias than other mode methods under a diversity of conditions. However, the half-range mode suffers from a relatively high variance and the robust parametric mode is more susceptible to bias by outliers. We determined that bootstrapping reduces the variance of both mode estimators. Application of the different methods to real data sets yielded results that were concordant with the simulations. Conclusion: Because the half-range mode is a simple and fast method, and produced less bias overall in our simulations, we recommend the bootstrapped version of it as a general-purpose mode estimator and suggest a bootstrap method for obtaining the standard error and 95% confidence interval of the mode. © 2003 Hedges and Shah; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

We estimate the Collins fragmentation function by introducing the effect of gluon rescattering in a model calculation of the fragmentation process. We include all necessary diagrams to the one-loop level and compute the nontrivial phases giving rise to the Collins function. We compare our results to the ones obtained from pion rescattering. We conclude that three out of four one-loop diagrams give sizeable contributions to the Collins function, and that the effect of gluon rescattering has a magnitude comparable to that of pion rescattering, but has opposite sign. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Background: The earliest fossil evidence of terrestrial animal activity is from the Ordovician, ∼450 million years ago (Ma). However, there are earlier animal fossils, and most molecular clocks suggest a deep origin of animal phyla in the Precambrian, leaving open the possibility that animals colonized land much earlier than the Ordovician. To further investigate the time of colonization of land by animals, we sequenced two nuclear genes, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase and enolase, in representative arthropods and conducted phylogenetic and molecular clock analyses of those and other available DNA and protein sequence data. To assess the robustness of animal molecular clocks, we estimated the deuterostome-arthropod divergence using the arthropod fossil record for calibration and tunicate instead of vertebrate sequences to represent Deuterostomia. Nine nuclear and 15 mitochondrial genes were used in phylogenetic analyses and 61 genes were used in molecular clock analyses. Results: Significant support was found for the unconventional pairing of myriapods (millipedes and centipedes) with chelicerates (spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, etc.) using nuclear and mitochondrial genes. Our estimated time for the divergence of millipedes (Diplopoda) and centipedes (Chilopoda) was 442 ± 50 Ma, and the divergence of insects and crustaceans was estimated as 666 ± 58 Ma. Our results also agree with previous studies suggesting a deep divergence (∼1100 - 900 Ma) for arthropods and deuterostomes, considerably predating the Cambrian Explosion seen in the animal fossil record. Conclusions: The consistent support for a close relationship between myriapods and chelicerates, using mitochondrial and nuclear genes and different methods of analysis, suggests that this unexpected result is not an artefact of analysis. We propose the name Myriochelata for this group of animals, which includes many that immobilize prey with venom. Our molecular clock analyses using arthropod fossil calibrations support earlier studies using vertebrate calibrations in finding that deuterostomes and arthropods diverged hundreds of millions of years before the Cambrian explosion. However, our molecular time estimate for the divergence of millipedes and centipedes is close to the divergence time inferred from fossils. This suggests that arthropods may have adapted to the terrestrial environment relatively late in their evolutionary history. © 2004 Pisani et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.