Findings derived from cataract surgery have provided a rich source of hypotheses for further research, including posited neurophysiological mechanisms (e.g., assemblies of brain cells) that might serve as the medium for the structural changes presumed to accompany perceptual learning.
These findings have greatly advanced our understanding of the basic causes of autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, and have provided a solid foundation for hypothesis-driven research into disease mechanisms.
Analyses of complete mitochondrial genome sequences have provided an alternative hypothesis for relationships among clade III taxa [ 19- 21].
A correlation between hypersialylation and immunoprotection has been observed, but few hypotheses have provided a mechanistic understanding of this immunosuppressive phenomenon.
This has been a long-standing question in the evolution of eukaryotic cells and these authors have provided a compelling analysis that rejects the hypothesis that the peroxisome is of endosymbiotic origin.
These observations have provided a theoretical basis to the empirical hypothesis of immune surveillance, i.e. that the immune system may act to eliminate tumours [ 8], only recently experimentally and epidemiologically confirmed [ 9].
Extensive studies have provided an alternative to the CDCV hypothesis, termed the common disease-rare variant (CDRV) hypothesis, that may also be important to the etiology of complex diseases [5], [6], [7].
Microarray techniques have provided an unbiased tool to generate hypotheses of potential disease-related genes and pathways, and have identified many dramatic genomic modifications in psoriasis compared with non-lesional and normal skin (Zhou et al., 2003; Gudjonsson et al., 2009; Suarez-Farinas et al., 2010a).
In addition to these two reports, a third group, Sacchi's group, has provided an opposite hypothesis, which is that pLG72 could inhibit DAAO activity in cells [ 9].
The somatic marker hypothesis has provided a conceptual basis for processes involved in risk-taking decision making and has been used to link discrete neural substrates to risk-related behaviors.
