Search

A great number of overseas students have studied medicine at Jinan University Medical School over the past decade. Statistics from the past ten years show that these students' test scores on diagnosis and medicine I & II are lower than those of their classmates from mainland China. To address the underlying causes of this phenomenon, we implemented a series of questionnaires for overseas and mainland Chinese medical students. The results indicate that there are no significant differences between overseas students and mainland Chinese students with regard to their attitude towards the study of medicine, their approval of the teaching and learning environments or their ability to improve their independent study capabilities at Jinan University Medical School; however, overseas students prefer to study at night and sleep later than their mainland Chinese classmates. One outstanding difference between these groups is that overseas students like to arrange their studies based on their interests, regardless of available time and subject contents, and this might lead them to perform poorly on examinations during their academic term at Jinan University Medical School. Overseas students might not have achieved scores as high as their Chinese classmates is that they do not completely focus on the content taught by teachers in class, which would later be assessed by exams at the end of each academic term. This observation is actually part of our medical educational concepts, especially in Chinese medical schools. Attention should be paid by both overseas students and medical schools to this discrepancy.

In order to obtain the stable PCR combinations for silkies genetic analysis, multiplex PCR was used and its reaction condition was optimized. Five combinations of multiplex PCR with good effects were obtained from eighteen microsatellite markers. Three of them were quadruplex-PCRs, and two were triplex-PCRs. The products of multiplex PCR were further combined into three sets for the electrophoresis on ABI 3100-Avant Genetic Analyzer. The results suggested that the eighteen microsatellite markers could be successfully applied to the silkies genetic analysis.

The 9 microsatellite markers on Chromosomes 1 were used to construct a linkage map of Liangshan semi-wool sheep with a 387 members half-sib pedigrees after paternity testing. The results were as follows: the number of alleles for 9 markers was from 5 to 15; the heterozygosity was from 0.202 to 0.831, the average heterozygosity was 0.617 and the polymorphic information content (PIC) was 0.604. Length of the linkage map of chromosome 1 we built was 311.0 cM which is in consistent with the sheep linkage map of USDA and IMF, and can be used in Quantitative Trait Loci searching in Liangshan semi-wool sheep.