Integrating Teaching and Research in Undergraduate Biology Laboratory Education

A course recently designed and implemented at Stanford University applies practical suggestions for creating research-based undergraduate courses that benefit both teaching and research

Natural history of Veromessor pergandei. l. The nest

Volume: 51Start Page: 205End Page: 21

Regulation of recruitment by individual scouts in Formica oreas Wheeler (Hymenoptera, Formicidae)

Individual scouts of F. oreas are capable of communicating resource availability, location and quality to nest mates. Recruited foragers can perceive and respond to differences in recruitment stimuli of individual scouts. Significantly more workers followed the path of an individual scout from a more rewarding food source than from a less rewarding food source. These findings suggest recruitment in ant colonies is regulated by recruited workers "weighing" recruitment stimuli of scouts returning from numerous areas about the nest

Foraging responses of Veromessor pergandei to changes in seed production (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

Volume: 52Start Page: 63End Page: 7

doi: 10.1046/j.1529-8817.2003.00072.x Quantifying the Intragenic Distribution of Human Disease Mutations

A wide variety of functional domains exist within human genes. Since different domains vary in their roles regarding overall gene function, the ability for a mutation in a gene region to produce disease varies among domains. We tested two hypotheses regarding distributions of mutations among functional domains by using (1) sets of single nucleotide disease mutations for six genes (CFTR, TSC2, G6PD, PAX6, RS1, and PAH) and (2) sets of polymorphic replacement and silent mutations found in two genes (CFTR and TSC2). First, we tested the null hypothesis that sets of mutations are uniformly distributed among functional domains within genes. Second, we tested the null hypothesis that disease mutations are distributed among gene regions according to expectations derived from the distribution of evolutionary conserved and variable amino acid sites throughout each gene. In contrast to the mainly uniform distribution of sets of silent and polymorphic mutations, sets of disease mutations generally rejected the null hypotheses of both uniform and evolutionary-influenced distributions. Although the disease mutation data showed a better agreement with the evolutionary-derived expectations, disease mutations were found to be statistically overabundant in conserved domains, and under-represented in variable regions, even after accounting for amino acid site variability of domains over long-term evolutionary history. This finding suggests that there is a nonadditive influence of amino acid site conservation on the observed intragenic distribution of disease mutations, and underscores the importance of understanding the patterns of neutral amino acid substitutions permitted in a gene over long-term evolutionary history