The brilliant tropical sun seems to pause in its daily routine to warm the beaches of North Queensland, Australia. The turquoise water glistens, reflecting its light. A line of bodies lie in the soft sand, allowing the sun to bronze their skin. One sunbather turns over to face the warm rays. Some energetic young people play a rousing game of volleyball. An elderly couple read under a palm tree, glancing up occasionally to watch the volleyball players.
In the Azorean Archipelago, the limpet Patella candei gomesii Drouët (1858) exhibits two distinct habitat morphs with respect to shell morphology: mosca, which is highly conical and commonly found above high tide mark, and mansa, which is flatter and intertidal. Although both morphs occur microsympatrically, their distribution is not random. This paper examines the genetic diversity between the two morphs over a set of 10 enzyme loci. Specimens of both forms were sampled on the two most oriental islands of this archipelago. High genetic identity values were found, thus rejecting the notion of reproductive isolation within these populations or between both habitat morphs.
This study was designed to determine if Wnt signaling mediated through beta-catenin plays a role in the early proliferation and differentiation of human connective tissue progenitor cells (CTPs). Bone Marrow was aspirated from nine human donors. Marrow was processed to isolate CTPs in vitro using established methods, and cells were plated onto 16-well Lab-Tech chamber slides. At day 6, the cells were fixed using 4% paraformaldehyde in phosphate buffered saline (PBS), blocked with goat serum in PBS, and incubated/stained with a monoclonal mouse anti- beta-catenin antibody and a fluorescent secondary.
