Communication of Genetic Information within Families: The Case for Familial Comity

Advances in genetic technologies raise a multitude of ethical issues, some of which give rise to novel dilemmas for medical practice. One of the most controversial problems arising in clinical genetics is that of confidentiality and who may disclose genetic health information. This paper considers the question of when it is appropriate for health professionals to disclose clinically significant genetic information without patient consent. Existing ethical principles offer little guidance in relation to this issue. We build on suggestions that genetic information may be viewed as collective or shared information, and we introduce the concept of ‘familial comity’ as a fresh way to consider the issues.Competing Interests: None declared. Funding: No special funding was secured for this research.     

The RNA World on Ice: A New Scenario for the Emergence of RNA Information

The RNA world hypothesis refers to a hypothetical era prior to coded peptide synthesis, where RNA was the major structural, genetic, and catalytic agent. Though it is a widely accepted scenario, a number of vexing difficulties remain. In this review we focus on a missing link of the RNA world hypothesis—primitive miniribozymes, in particular ligases, and discuss the role of these molecules in the evolution of RNA size and complexity. We argue that prebiotic conditions associated with freezing, rather than “warm and wet” conditions, could have been of key importance in the early RNA world.[Reviewing Editor: Dr. Niles Lehman]     

世界水生植物科属检索系统的设计与建立

生物分类学涉及海量数据 ,而且随着研究的不断深入 ,各类相关信息还在以惊人的速度增长 ,这为利用传统方法和管理模式处理复杂的数据带来了很大困难。随着计算机技术的发展 ,其特有的高效性、稳定性等特点为大量生物信息的处理带来了革命性的变化。利用计算机技术管理生物信息不仅可以大幅度提高工作效率 ,而且对充分发挥其管理信息的作用具有重要的意义。人们已经在分类学方面进行了许多工作 ,也取得了不少成绩。例如英国的国立植被分类系统 ( Na-tional Vegetation Classification) ,它全面系统地总结了整个英国的植被类型 ,其支撑系统…     

Psychological Problems Of Dialogue In Light Of The Ideas Of M. M. Bakhtin And A. A. Ukhtomskii

Comparative examination of the scientific and philosophical ideas of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin and Aleksei Alekseevich Ukhtomskii is of interest from the standpoint of both the psychological theory of communication and the practice of psychological counseling, psychotherapy, and upbringing. Development of the applied areas of psychology poses the tasks of understanding the particular person and his individual problems and offering psychological assistance in the process of communication. To deal with these questions it is not sufficient to have scientific psychological training, i.e., knowledge of the general laws of personality development and communication; a capacity for personal communication as an aid to resolving human life problems is also necessary.     

The International Rice Information System. A platform for meta-analysis of rice crop data

Ambiguous germplasm identification; difficulty in tracing pedigree information; and lack of integration between genetic resources, characterization, breeding, evaluation, and utilization data are constraints in developing knowledge-intensive crop improvement programs. To address these constraints, the International Crop Information System (www.icis.cgiar.org), a database system for the management and integration of global information on genetic resources and crop improvement for any crop, was developed by genetic resource specialists, crop scientists, and information technicians associated with the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research and collaborative partners. The International Rice Information System (www.iris.irri.org) is the rice (Oryza species) implementation of the International Crop Information System. New components are now being added to the International Rice Information System to handle the diversity of rice functional genomics data including genomic sequence data, molecular genetic data, expression data, and proteomic information. Users access information in the database through stand-alone programs and Web interfaces, which offer specialized applications and customized views to researchers with different interests.     

The Formation Of A Behavioral Act: The Problem Of Intrasystemic Heterochronicity

Among the timely questions facing contemporary physiology, study of the laws of formation of new behavioral acts in learning by human beings and animals is one of the most important. The general theory of functional systems has made a substantial contribution to resolution of this problem [1-6]. According to this theory, human and animal behavior are based on the formation of special physiological integrations, selectively uniting central and peripheral components of the organism to achieve an overall adaptative result. It was found that such functional systems, despite the considerable variability in their component composition, always have an invariable internal operational architectonics [5]. Their functioning always involves the same sequence of key mechanisms: processes of afferent synthesis and the system of the acceptor of the result of an action (ARA), the realization of an "executive act," the accomplishment of an adaptative result, and evaluation of its parameters.     

PFDB: A Protein Families DataBase for Macintosh Computers. The Effectiveness of Its Organization in Searching for Protein Similarity

A protein sequence database (PFDB) containing about 11,000 entries is available for Macintosh computers. The PFDB can be easily updated by importing sequences from the PIR collection through the internet. The most important feature of the database is its organization in families of closely related sequences, each family being characterized by its average dipeptide composition [Petrilli (1993), Comput. Appl. Biosci. 2, 89–93]. This allows one to perform a rapid and sensitive protein similarity search by comparing the precalculated family dipeptide composition with that of the query sequence by a linear correlation coefficient. An example of an application in which a new protein was classsified by using a sequence of a fragment just 19 residues long is reported.