A Study of the Inheritance and the Physiological Behaviour of Dwarfism Associated with an Eye Defect in Rats

Four dwarfed rats recently appeared in two separate closely related litters of an inbred strain of rats in our colony. There was associated with the dwarfed condition a marked opacity of the eyes apparently causing blindness

Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities, dominance drive, and sex-chromosome introgression at secondary contact zones: A simulation study.

Dobzhansky-Muller (DM) incompatibilities involving sex chromosomes have been proposed to account for Haldane's rule (lowered fitness among hybrid offspring of the heterogametic sex) as well as Darwin's corollary (asymmetric fitness costs with respect to the direction of the cross). We performed simulation studies of a hybrid zone to investigate the effects of different types of DM incompatibilities on cline widths and positions of sex-linked markers. From our simulations, X-Y incompatibilities generate steep clines for both X-linked and Y-linked markers; random effects may produce strong noise in cline center positions when migration is high relative to fitness costs, but X- and Y-centers always coincide strictly. X-autosome and Y-autosome incompatibilities also generate steep clines, but systematic shifts in cline centers occur when migration is high relative to selection, as a result of a dominance drive linked to Darwin's corollary. Interestingly, sex-linked genes always show farther introgression than the associated autosomal genes. We discuss ways of disentangling the potentially confounding effects of sex biases in migration, we compare our results to those of a few documented contact zones, and we stress the need to study independent replicates of the same contact zone

Video-assisted thoracic surgical resection of giant cardiac lipoma: a case report

We describe the case of a 73-year-old man, with a history of previous coronary artery by-pass, who presented at our division for new onset of angina, hypotension and dyspnea due to a primary giant para-cardiac lipoma. The success of complete resection of the mass achieved by means of video-assisted thoracic surgical procedure demonstrated the efficacy and safeness of this method in the treatment of benign cardiac tumours