Heritabilities of Apolipoprotein and Lipid Levels in Three Countries

This study investigated the influence of genes and environment on the variation of apolipoprotein and lipid levels, which are important intermediate phenotypes in the pathways toward cardiovascular disease. Heritability estimates are presented, including those for apolipoprotein E and All levels which have rarely been reported before. We studied twin samples from the Netherlands (two cohorts; n = 160 pairs, aged 13-22 and n = 204 pairs, aged 34-62), Australia (n = 1362 pairs, aged 28-92) and Sweden (n = 302 pairs, aged 42-88). The variation of apolipoprotein and lipid levels depended largely on the influences of additive genetic factors in each twin sample. There was no significant evidence for the influence of common environment. No sex differences in heritability estimates for any phenotype in any of the samples were observed. Heritabilities ranged from 0.48-0.87, with most heritabilities exceeding 0.60. The heritability estimates in the Dutch samples were significantly higher than in the Australian sample. The heritabilities for the Swedish were intermediate to the Dutch and the Australian samples and not significantly different from the heritabilities in these other two samples. Although sample specific effects are present, we have shown that genes play a major role in determining the variance of apolipoprotein and lipid levels in four independent twin samples from three different countries

Soundness-preserving refinements of service compositions

Soundness is one of the well-studied properties of processes; it denotes that a final state can be reached from every state that is reachable from the initial state. Soundness-preserving refinements are important for enabling the compositional design of systems. In this paper we concentrate on refinements of service compositions. We model service compositions using Petri nets, and consider specific pairs of places that belong to different services. Starting from a sound service composition, we show how to check whether such a pair of places can be refined by another sound service composition, so that soundness is preserved through the refinement

Genomic Deletion Marking an Emerging Subclone of Francisella tularensis subsp. holarctica in France and the Iberian Peninsula

P. 7465-7470Francisella tularensis subsp. holarctica is widely disseminated in North America and the boreal and temperate regions of the Eurasian continent. Comparative genomic analyses identified a 1.59-kb genomic deletion specific to F. tularensis subsp. holarctica isolates from Spain and France. Phylogenetic analysis of strains carrying this deletion by multiple-locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis showed that the strains comprise a highly related set of genotypes, implying that these strains were recently introduced or recently emerged by clonal expansion in France and the Iberian PeninsulaS

A trace-based view on operating guidelines

Operating guidelines have been introduced to characterize all controllers for a given service S. A controller of S is a service that interacts with S without deadlocking. An operating guideline of S can be used to decide whether S refines another service. It is a special-purpose structure to describe the behavior of service S from the perspective of its controllers rather than from the perspective of S. This paper provides a more conceptual understanding of operating guidelines from the erspective of a traditional concurrency semantics: a trace-based semantics. As benefits, we get an easier characterization of service refinement, and prove that this is a fully abstract precongruence

Conformance checking of services using the best matching private view

We investigate whether a running implementation of a service conforms to its formal specification in a setting, where only recorded behavior of that implementation is given. Existing conformance checking techniques can be used to measure the degree of conformance of the recorded behavior and its public view but may produce false negatives , because a correct implementation (i.e., private view) may deviate significantly from its specification. Many of such deviations are quite harmless. The private view may, for example, reorder some activities without introducing any problems, yet traditional conformance checking would penalize such changes unjustifiably. To overcome this problem, we present a novel approach that determines a best matching private view. We show that among the infinitely many private views, there is a canonical best matching private view. While the represented theory is general and can be applied to arbitrary service models, the implementation is currently limited to acyclic service models