Although correlates of protection in HIV-1 infection are still elusive, it is widely believed that the breadth of immune response plays an important role in disease outcome, and is likely to be associated with the breadth of viral mutational pathways.
This agrees with the observation that housekeeping genes in mice and human evolve more slowly than tissue-specific genes (Zhang and Li 2004), which can also be associated with the increased breadth of expression of such genes compared with tissue-specific genes (Park and Choi 2010).
Using bulked segregant analysis of 247 F2 individuals of a cross between Basmati370/ASD 16, two microsatellite markers RM225 and RM247 have been identified and reported to be associated with grain breadth and cooked grain breadth, respectively [ 18].
Finally, as we observed that a decreased level of immunodominance is generally associated with an increased breadth of the response and also with an increased number of CD8+ cells, we conclude that broader and stronger (higher activation and killing) immune responses are likely to increase the impact of viral recombination on the escape dynamics.
As pointed out by Devlin et al. (2006), there are limitations and difficulties associated with collecting the breadth of empirical data required to accurately represent the full range of genotype by environment interactions affecting fitness-related life history traits in the wild.
This bacterium is associated with a wide breadth of human gastrointestinal disease, including numerous cancers, inflammatory disorders, and pathogenic infections, but is also known to confer fitness benefits to its host both indirectly, through interactions with other pathogens, and directly.
Two of the most notable of these types of studies involved comparisons of the gut microbiota of obese and lean mice (Turnbaugh et al., 2006) and the identification of large niche breadth associated with the use of a range of different carbon compounds in the coastal ocean (Mou et al., 2008).
Furthermore, regression analysis showed that the ratio of genes containing CpG islands overlapping a TSS was significantly and positively associated with expression breadth at a very high coefficient.
Though important, these findings must be viewed in the context of the substantial technical challenges associated with a screen of this breadth and depth, most notably the sensitivity of the macrophage responses to variations in the bacterial inoculum, which could not be perfectly normalized across 10,100 mutants.
