The semi-dominant Br mutation affects presphenoid growth, producing the facial retrognathism and globular neurocranial vault that characterize heterozygotes. We analysed the impact of this mutation on skull shape, comparing heterozygotes to wildtype mice, to determine if the effects are skull-wide or confined to the sphenoid region targeted by the mutation. In addition, we examined patterns of variability of shape for the skull as a whole and for three regions (basicranium, face and neurocranium). We found that the Br mice differed significantly from wildtype mice in skull shape in all three regions as well as in the shape of the skull as a whole. However, the significant increases in variance and fluctuating asymmetry were found only in the basicranium of mutant mice. These results suggest that the mutation has a significant effect on the underlying developmental architecture of the skull, which produces an increase in phenotypic variability that is localized to the anatomical region in which the mean phenotype is most dramatically affected. These results suggest that the same developmental mechanisms that produce the change in phenotypic mean also produce the change in variance.

Use of a novel self-expanding, fully retrievable stent resulted in fast and very high recanalization rates in acute ischemic strokes with intravascular occlusions.

Background: The Bluejay genome browser has been developed over several years to address the challenges posed by the ever increasing number of data types as well as the increasing volume of data in genome research. Beginning with a browser capable of rendering views of XML-based genomic information and providing scalable vector graphics output, we have now completed version 1.0 of the system with many additional features. Our development efforts were guided by our observation that biologists who use both gene expression profiling and comparative genomics gain functional insights above and beyond those provided by traditional per-gene analyses.

Many questions that biologists want to answer using the information available from completely sequenced genomes are complex. A graphical environment allows users to visually explore and operate on a sequence. Sequence and annotation data exists in bewildering varieties of types and levels of detail. The graphical environment therefore needs to adapt to this variation to provide the user the best possible visual representation of genomic data in a given context. As more and more online tools and services become available for biologists, mediating software should also be able to integrate and link to them. The Bluejay browser is a Java-based visual environment for exploring biological sequences. Uniquely, Bluejay fully integrates existing gene expression software into a genomic context. Bluejay also differentiates itself from most form-based HTML sequence browsers because it: (i) is highly scalable so that it can visualize a wide range of genomic objects ranging from a large whole genome down to individual nucleotides by using data-transformational Web services; and (ii) dynamically discovers and provides links to disparate resources such as gene annotation data (via XLinks) and semanticallydescribed biological Web Services (via the BioMOBY protocol).

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