Dysmorphology in the Bible and the Talmud

This article enumerates the congenital anomalies mentioned in the Bible and the Talmud, the two holiest and oldest texts in Judaism. Most of these conditions were described to regulate attributes that would disqualify a Priest from performing religious rituals in the Temple in Jerusalem. However, the cultural atmosphere in Biblical and Talmudical times was one in which physical deformity did not necessarily evoke a negative aesthetic reaction, an assumption of ill health, or the expectation of economic dependence.     

helminthR: an R interface to the London Natural History Museum's Host–Parasite Database

The understanding of the diversity and distribution of helminth parasites is currently constrained by the limited number of host–parasite interaction databases, and the difficulty in accessing existing data. The London Natural History Museum's Host–Parasite Database represents one such underutilized database, containing over a quarter million helminth parasite occurrence records, accessible through a web interface. To enable users to programmatically search and manipulate data from this database, I developed an R package called helminthR. Here, I introduce the core functions of the package, and detail how helminthR can be used to obtain host–parasite interaction records, citations for interactions, and host taxonomic data.     

Dysmorphology and mental retardation: molecular cytogenetic studies in dysmorphic mentally retarded patients

In an institutionalised population of 471 mentally retarded adult residents (436 males and 35 females), 18 patients (16 males and 2 females) with dysmorphic features were selected to perform FISH studies by using subtelomeric probes to discover cryptic terminal deletions or duplications, undetectable with standard banding techniques. In the 13 investigated patients, no abnormalities were found with a selected battery of subtelomeric probes. The results of cryptic chromosomal rearrangement studies are variable but the frequency of positive diagnostic findings seems to be lower than previously expected.