For Ms. Vardalos, the night began several hours earlier at what should have been a more ethnically neutral site, the Apple Store in SoHo.
Veteran caucus watchers said the switch should also make the sites more neutral, decreasing chances that a determined host can use a home field advantage to steer a caucus toward a favorite.
More recently, three other neutral sites have been identified, based on a RNA-sequencing study, and characterized under continuous light, at 30°C.
Goodell said that if a 17-game season were adopted, the additional games could be played at neutral sites, giving the N.F.L. the flexibility to play more games overseas.
These rates are higher for more neutral positions such as third codon positions and 4-fold degenerated sites (+0.22% and +0.29% of GC bases per kb, respectively).
Evidence of more extensive 'strain structure' at antigenic, immune-selected sites compared to neutral sites suffices as proof that selective forces are at work, and of these, immune selection is the most parsimonious explanation.
Overall, for hMC4R, SNAP differentiated well between the functionally disruptive variants and neutral sites (∼86% of substitutions considered nonneutral by two or more experimental studies were correctly predicted).
This phenomenon is more obvious for short genomes, since natural selection is known to reduce the effective population size for neutral sites closely linked to selected ones.
Thus, there are significantly more sites undergoing positive selection and that have an impact of the net charge of the protein compared to all other neutral sites (p = 0.03; 22% for charged residues versus 5% for neutral sites).
