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Tailless amphibians belonging to the order Batrachia are a significant component of human consumption. However, there is limited literature on the consumption of these amphibians by humans. Therefore, the present work aimed to examine the presence of drug residues in edible Batrachia, and compare them with other aquatic products. We assessed 22 veterinary drug residues, including 12 sulfonamides (SAs) and ten quinolones (QNs), in various aquatic products, including edible Batrachia. To provide a comparative analysis, we referenced literature from China between 2005 and 2020 regarding SAs and QNs detected in aquatic products. Additionally, we calculated the food safety index (IFS) of antibiotics, and conducted a health risk assessment. The findings revealed that the detection rate, average residual amount, and over-standard rate of antibiotics in edible Batrachia were higher than most other aquatic products. Furthermore, the systematic cluster analysis demonstrated that edible Batrachia could serve as a potential sentinel animal, distinguishing them from several other aquatic products. The total IFS of all residues obtained from different aquatic products in the present work was less than 1, thus indicating their safety in terms of public health. Nevertheless, it is essential to conduct detailed investigations into the maximum residues of certain antibiotics in specific aquatic products that exceed the safety limits to understand their impact on human health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identification of the HLA system is important in anthropological and immunological studies. This paper proposes a simple index typing method to perform the assignment of HLA serological data. It is parsimonious and able to deal with the data of cross-reacting antigens and ill-defined sera. The method is illustrated by an example of the application of the Chinese HLA-A system in Taiwan. A general FORTRAN program for analysing the typing process is available on request from the first author. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the G-banding technique, we examined lymphocytes from 90 individuals (43 males and 47 females, median age 31 years) living in buildings constructed with radioactively contaminated rebars. Forty-five nonexposed control subjects (22 males and 23 females, median age 30 years), matched to the radiation-exposed individuals by sex and age, were selected for comparison. At least 500 metaphases were checked for each individual. All recognizable structural aberrations of chromosomes or chromatids were recorded. After adjusting for age and smoking status, both the percentage of cells with aberrant chromosomes (PCAC) and the number of aberrant chromosomes per 100 cells (NAC) were found to be significantly higher in the radiation-exposed females than in the control females (p < 0.05 for PCAC and NAC). This difference, however, was not observed in the comparison of radiation-exposed and control males. This suggests a possible interaction between sex and radiation exposure in their effects on chromosome aberrations., (Copyright 2001 National Science Council, ROC and S. Karger AG, Basel)

Identification of fragile sites is a way to investigate the genetic abnormalities that are the hallmark of cancer and play an important role in carcinogenesis. Manifestation of nonrandom breakage at a chromosome band is an essential criterion for determination of the fragility of the band. In this article, a new detection procedure is proposed. This new procedure takes the relationship of one site with the others into consideration and can be applied to tests of the randomness of breakpoints under either the proportional probability model (PPM) or the equiprobability model (EPM). The procedure can form a grouping structure that classifies all sites into several clusters. It is applied to identification of fragile sites for a real data set for Chinese patients with colorectal carcinoma for illustration of the proposed method.

In human genetic analysis, data are collected through the so-called 'ascertainment procedure'. Statistically this sampling scheme can be thought of as a multistage sampling method. At the first stage, one or several probands are ascertained. At the subsequent stages, a sequential sampling scheme is applied. Sampling in such a way is virtually a nonrandom procedure, which, in most cases, causes biased estimation which may be intractable. This paper focuses on the underlying causes of the intractability problem of ascertained genetic data. Three types of parameters, i.e. target, design and nuisance parameters, are defined as the essences to formulate the true likelihood of a set of data. These parameters are also classified into explicit or implicit parameters depending on whether they can be expressed explicity in the likelihood function. For ascertained genetic data, a sequential scheme is regarded as an implicit design parameter, and a true pedigree structure as an implicit nuisance parameter. The intractability problem is attributed to loss of information of any implicit parameter in likelihood formulation. Several approaches to build a likelihood for estimation of the segregation ratio when only an observed pedigree structure is available are proposed., (Copyright 2001 S. Karger AG, Basel)

Segregation ratio estimation has long been important in human genetics. A simple truncated binomial model is considered that assumes complete ascertainment and a deterministic genotype-phenotype relationship. A simple but intuitively appealing estimator of the segregation ratio, previously proposed, is shown to have a negative bias. It is also shown that the bias of this estimator can be largely reduced via a randomization device, resulting in a new estimator that has the same large-sample behavior but with a negligible bias (decaying at a geometric rate). Numerical results are given to show the small-sample performance of this new estimator. An extension to incomplete ascertainment is also considered.

Background: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of weight changes after completion of chemotherapy on the prognosis and survival of patients with intermediate and high grade non-Hodgkin's lymphoma., Materials and Methods: A retrospective analysis of data on patients from the TCOG T1488 protocol, a phase II study using CHOP in the treatment of intermediate and high grade lymphoma. From September, 1988 to December 1994, 138 adult patients had complete weight data for analysis. Weight gain in lymphoma patients after therapy significantly correlated with improved survival (Logrank test p = .0031). In patients with initial B symptoms, weight gain after therapy correlated with survival (Logrank test p = .0039), female patients (odds ratio = 6.2) were less likely to gain weight on treatment., Conclusion: Weight gain after chemotherapy for lymphoma is a significant positive prognostic factor for survival.

Schizophrenia is a common complex mental disorder. The lifetime prevalence of this disease is about 1% across different populations. The etiology is still unknown despite decades of intensive study. This report is aimed at studying the relationship between chromosomal fragile sites and the etiology of schizophrenia. Lymphocytes of 72 schizophrenic patients and 66 healthy controls were cultured in M medium, which is deficient in folic acid, and in medium RPMI 1640 with distamycin A. G-banding was carried out on 100 metaphases of each individual. Fragile sites were characterized as specific chromosomal bands that exhibit nonrandom gaps or breaks. Culture in M medium resulted in significant differences in the total number of chromosomal lesions and the total number of cells with chromosomal lesions between patients and controls (P<0.001), while no difference was noted after exposure to distamycin A. In the case of M medium, 17 bands in both patients and controls were recognized as expressing fragile sites nonrandomly using a statistical method based on the relationship of the binomial and F distributions. Further analysis using Fisher's exact test revealed a significant excess of expression of a rare fragile site at 2q11.2 among patients compared with controls (P<0.05). In the case of distamycin A induction, 13 bands were identified as having nonrandom expression of fragile sites using the same statistical method. A significant excess expression of a fragile site at 9q12 was identified among patients compared with controls by applying Fisher's exact test (P<0.001). Thus, our data suggest that chromosomal bands 2q11.2 and 9q12 are interesting regions that may harbor important genes associated with schizophrenia.

We studied the allelic frequency of the variable number of tandem repeats region 3' of the apolipoprotein B gene (apoB 3' VNTR) and its impact on coronary artery disease (CAD) in 150 patients with CAD and 153 normal controls in a Taiwan population. apoB 3' VNTR alleles were classified according to the number of repeats of a 15-bp hypervariable elements (HVE), the sequence of which was determined using the polymerase chain reaction and direct sequencing. Thirteen alleles comprising from 26 to 54 HVEs were identified. The CAD patients had greater heterozygosity (0.58 vs 0.42) and a higher frequency of long (> 36-HVE) apoB 3' VNTR alleles than the controls (18.7% vs 10.8%, p < 0.01). CAD patients with two HVE-36 alleles and no HVE-32 alleles (the two most common forms) had significantly higher concentrations of LDL-cholesterol, apolipoprotein B, and triglycerides, and significantly lower values of HDL-cholesterol and apolipoprotein AI than the control group (p < 0.01 for all comparisons). The length of the apoB 3' VNTR was not correlated with the plasma concentrations of any of the lipids. We conclude that long apoB 3' VNTR alleles occur more frequently in CAD patients, but that apoB 3'VNTR genotypic variation has little impact on the risk of dyslipidemia in Taiwanese.

The self-contained subsets method subdivides a genetic data set into a number of subsets from which estimates are computed. The advantage of such a method is that when a subset is suspected of containing unreliable data then discarding that subset will not invalidate the remaining subsets for estimation. Thus, the complicated computation required to deal with truncated data can be avoided. In this paper, using estimation of gene frequencies as an example for one subset case, the marginal distribution of a subset total is derived and then, using this distribution, the variance of the frequency estimate of a gene frequency from the subdivision method is calculated. The subdivision method is also applied to impute the number of people of a truncated group. Finally, more complex cases where there are multiple subsets available for estimation are discussed. Results are compared to those of previous studies.

Forensic judgment of paternity depends on genetic and nongenetic evidence. Sometimes genetic marker tests can provide clear evidence to exclude a falsely accused man, but they do not always succeed. On the other hand, if the accusation is true, the alleged father will not ever be excluded by genetic marker tests. When a nonexclusion case occurs after one or more marker tests, a report of paternity probability is required in the court. The current methods for calculating the paternity probability are the "paternity index method" and the "nonexclusion method." A number of recent articles have openly debated the fallacies, validity and utility of both methods. This paper briefly reviews the two methods and proposes a non-excluded set method along with examples for illustrating the various patterns of paternity probabilities of the three methods.

Testing the nonrandomness of breakage at a chromosome band is an essential step fo identifying a fragile site. In this paper, we propose a method derived by using the relationship between the binomial and F distributions for testing nonrandomness. The method is simple in calculation. It was applied to the detection of fragile sites for Chinese patients with colorectal carcinoma.

In linkage analysis a single-child family is usually considered to be completely uninformative. This article shows that such a family can provide information on linkage disequilibrium, even if it provides no information on linkage equilibrium. A transition matrix consisting of the recombination fraction and the phase proportion is proposed to study the genetic transmission from a pair of parents to their single child. The information about linkage for a single-child family is shown to be confounded by the phase proportion. This explains why such a family used to be considered uninformative under the assumption of linkage equilibrium. By reparametrizing the recombination fraction and the phase proportion into one parameter, it is demonstrated that extracting information on linkage disequilibrium is feasible. The study of power of the testing method proposed here is carried out by simulation.

Human leukocyte antigens (HLA) were investigated in 200 healthy Taiwan inhabitants of Taiwanese (46 persons), Hakka (36), Tai-Ya Tribe (28) Pu-Long Tribe (30) Pai-Wan Tribe (30) and Lu-kai (30) descent. In those of Taiwanese and Hakka descent, HLA-A11 and A2 were the two most frequently seen human leukocyte antigens. HLA-A11 was seen in 69.6% in those of Taiwanese descent and 61.1% in those of Hakka descent. HLA-A2 was seen in 50.0% of the Taiwanese and 44.4% of the Hakka. For the B loci, B40 (Taiwanese, 43.5%; Hakka, 44.4%), Bw46 (Taiwanese, 28.3%; Hakka, 19.4%) and B13 (Taiwanese, 15.2%; Hakka, 30.6%) were the most common antigens. For the C loci, Cw3 (Taiwanese, 57.1%; Hakka 64.9%), Cw1 (Taiwanese, 28.6%; Hakka, 35.1%) and Cw7 (Taiwanese, 40.5%; Hakka, 29.9%) were commonly seen antigens. The most commonly detected antigens for the DR loci were: DR2 (Taiwanese, 45.1%; Hakka, 56.8%) and DR4 (Taiwanese, 37.3%; Hakka, 32.4%). These results disclose that no major human leukocyte antigenic differences exist between the two aforementioned groups in this study. In addition, there are no major differences in Taiwanese and Hakka descent, and those of south and north mainland Chinese descent. All bear some antigenic similarities. However, for aborigines, the original inhabitants of Taiwan, the HLA antigens are significantly different from the Han Chinese as a whole. Characteristic features are seen in A24, Bw60, DRw6 and DRw8. In the meantime, a high frequency of common antigens are shared among the tribes and consequently a large number of blank alleles are seen in the aborigines. This reflects the homozygosity effect which is often seen in an isolated society.

A random mating population attains equilibrium by the Hardy-Weinberg law. By demonstrating some simple examples for 2-allele loci, Li (1988) showed that a nonrandom mating population of certain mating patterns may also attain equilibrium. He called such a type of population a pseudo-random mating population. Tai (1990), then, gave a generalized representation of these pseudo-random mating systems. In this paper the clear patterns of pseudo-random mating behavior for a 3-allele locus are derived. Both autosomal and sex-linked systems are discussed. The study of these mating patterns provides a way to understand the complicated mating system of a population, which usually is only with difficulty realized through sampled individuals from that population.

Using a linkage model with mixed parental mating types between a trait locus and a marker locus the asymptotic null distribution of the statistic U = 2ln(10)Z(theta) was stimulated and compared to the chi square type distribution function 1/2 + 1/2 Pr [chi 2(1) less than mu]. The stimulation results show that the chi square approximation fits the asymptotic null distribution well when both loci are predominated by either one of the two alleles at their loci, respectively, or the linkage phase tends to disequilibrium.

This paper proposes a method to deal with linkage analysis under the existence of association between a disease and a marker locus. We specially consider the disease as a quantitative trait. At first, we propose a so-called "a minimum sum of square errors approach" to classify individuals in a family genetically, then use the classification results to detect linkage with association by the developed method.