Ryan M. Ames

TL;DR: Of the factors tested, relative social deprivation best captures the aspects of the obesogenic environment responsible for the risk of obesity in genetically susceptible adults.

TL;DR: Assessment of circRNA expression in aging human blood and followed up age-associated circRNA in relation to human aging phenotypes suggest that circRNA may represent a novel class of regulatory RNA involved in the determination of aging Phenotypes, which may show future promise as both biomarkers and future therapeutic targets for age-related disease.

TL;DR: It is found that yeast show an abundance of duplicate genes that are lineage specific, leading to a large degree of variation in gene content between individual strains, indicating that gene duplication can give rise to substantial phenotypic differences within populations that in turn can offer a shortcut to evolutionary adaptation.

TL;DR: Weighted parsimony and maximum likelihood methods for inferring gain and loss events are developed and it is found that for all simulations maximum likelihood-based methods are very accurate for reconstructing the number of duplication events on the phylogenetic tree, and that maximum likelihood and weighted parsimony have similar accuracy for reconstructioning the ancestral state.

TL;DR: The data suggest that circRNAs are abundantly expressed in human islets, and that some are differentially regulated in the islets of donors with type 2 diabetes.