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Humans experience unanticipated external postural perturbations and recover their posture faster via involuntary responses than voluntary responses. Previous cross-sectional comparisons between athletes and untrained populations have suggested that daily motor experiences can lead to adaptations in the reftex system, but the temporal aspect of this adaptation has been unclear. Here we show that judokas have an earlier muscle activation response to even non-judo-specific external perturbations compared with an untrained population. The response latency to a backward push-and-release type postural perturbation was compared between male judokas (n = 7. career >13 years. ranging from world champions to prefectural competitors) and untrained nonjudokas (n = 7). Latency was defined as the instant of tibialis anterior muscle activity onset. Judokas exhibited shorter latency (20.6 ± 7.1 ms) than nonjudokas (28.3 ± 8.9 ms). The rank order of latency in judokas did not correlate with their competition performance. We suggest that daily training in responding to perturbations might improve some parts of the sensorimotor pathway relating to postural response latency, and that this excellence in involuntary response is independent of athletic performance. The findings provide a novel perspective for understanding postural control ability in humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restriction Landmark Genome Scanning (RLGS) used to detect large numbers of restriction landmarks in a single experiment andapplied to analyze the genetic diversity of Asian and African sorghum accessions. This method is one of the genome analysistools based on the concept that restriction enzyme sites can serve as landmarks throughout a genome. RLGS uses direct endlabelingof the genomic DNA digested with a rare-cutting restriction enzyme and high-resolution two-dimensionalelectrophoresis. It has an advantage of providing precise information on a spot intensity that reflects the copy number ofrestriction landmarks and to visualize differences in methylation levels across the genome. RLGS becomes very useful for doingwhole genome scans that equals the work of thousands of polymerase chain reactions. A study was carried out using Sorghumaccessions collected from countries viz., Morocco, Nigeria, Sudan, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, and China. Onerepresentative sample was chosen from a country for analysis carried out at National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences(NIAS). Two dimensional spot images for seven accessions obtained and spot intensities were scanned. Totally, 119 spots weredetected of which 95 spots observed as polymorphic and 24 as non polymorphic. Unique presence and null spots werespecifically detected in all accessions taken for study. A total of 37 unique spots and 12 null spots, detected in this experiment.Principal Coordinate Analysis indicated, four African accessions scattered in the diagram were diverse and three Asianaccessions closely distributed with narrow diversity. The phylogenetic tree showed that Sudan and Nigerian accessions weredistant while Chinna, Japan and Korea accessions had close proximity