HLA typing of amniotic fluid cells has been used for the prenatal diagnosis of the HLA linked diseases congenital adrenal hyperplasia (21-OH-deficiency (21-OH-def) type) and complement C4 deficiency and it has also been used for the prenatal de termination of paternity. There are, however, technical difficulties in this test associated with the weak expression of some B locus antigens on amniotic fluid cells, and theoretical difficulties related to associations between particular HLA antigens and the 21-OH-def allele. Since certain HLA-B locus antigens are found in significantly increased frequencies among patients with 21-OH-def, there is a relatively high incidence of HLA-B homozygosity among the patients and over 40 percent of the parents of these patients share one or more HLA-B locus antigens. Results of some prenatal HLA typing tests may thus be difficult to interpret, and supplementary tests should be used whenever possible. HLA typing of amniotic cells is, however, the only available procedure for prenatal diagnosis of C4 deficiency and it is the best available procedure for prenatal determination of paternity. A modification of our original procedure allows HLA typing to be performed with increased numbers of HLA typing sera, and sera with optimum reactivity for amniotic fluid cells have now been selected for the definition of most of the more commonly expressed HLA antigens. Although amniotic fluid cells do not express DR antigens, amniotic fluid cells can be typed for the HLA-linked marker glyoxalase I (GLO) and this may be the informative for prenatal diagnosis in some cases. 相似文献
Several social mammals, including elephants and some primates, whales and bats, live in multilevel societies that form temporary subgroups. Despite these fission–fusion dynamics, group members often maintain long-term bonds. However, it is unclear whether such individual links and the resulting stable social subunits continue to exist after a complete reorganisation of a society, e.g. following a population crash. Here, we employed a weighted network analysis on 7,109 individual roosting records collected over 4 years in a wild Bechstein’s bat colony. We show that, in response to a strong population decline, the colony’s two stable social subunits fused into a non-modular social network. Nevertheless, in the first year after the crash, long-term bonds were still detectable, suggesting that the bats remembered previous individual relationships. Our findings are important for understanding the flexibility of animal societies in the face of dramatic changes and for the conservation of social mammals with declining populations.
Adaptive cluster sampling (ACS) is an efficient sampling design for estimating parameters of rare and clustered populations.
It is widely used in ecological research. The modified Hansen-Hurwitz (HH) and Horvitz-Thompson (HT) estimators based on small
samples under ACS have often highly skewed distributions. In such situations, confidence intervals based on traditional normal
approximation can lead to unsatisfactory results, with poor coverage properties. Christman and Pontius (Biometrics 56:503–510,
2000) showed that bootstrap percentile methods are appropriate for constructing confidence intervals from the HH estimator.
But Perez and Pontius (J Stat Comput Simul 76:755–764, 2006) showed that bootstrap confidence intervals from the HT estimator
are even worse than the normal approximation confidence intervals. In this article, we consider two pseudo empirical likelihood
functions under the ACS design. One leads to the HH estimator and the other leads to a HT type estimator known as the Hájek
estimator. Based on these two empirical likelihood functions, we derive confidence intervals for the population mean. Using
a simulation study, we show that the confidence intervals obtained from the first EL function perform as good as the bootstrap
confidence intervals from the HH estimator but the confidence intervals obtained from the second EL function perform much
better than the bootstrap confidence intervals from the HT estimator, in terms of coverage rate. 相似文献