OBJECTIVE: To determine patient preferences for addressing religion and spirituality in the medical encounter. DESIGN:Multicenter survey verbally administered by trained research assistants. Survey items included questions on demographics, health status, health care utilization, functional status, spiritual well-being, and patient preference for religious/spiritual involvement in their own medical encounters and in hypothetical medical situations. SETTING:Primary care clinics of 6 academic medical centers in 3 states (NC, Fla, Vt). PATIENTS/PARTICIPANTS:Patients 18 years of age and older who were systematically selected from the waiting rooms of their primary care physicians. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS:Four hundred fifty-six patients participated in the study. One third of patients wanted to be asked about their religious beliefs during a routine office visit. Two thirds felt that physicians should be aware of their religious or spiritual beliefs. Patient agreement with physician spiritual interaction increased strongly with the severity of the illness setting, with 19% patient agreement with physician prayer in a routine office visit, 29% agreement in a hospitalized setting, and 50% agreement in a near-death scenario (P < .001). Patient interest in religious or spiritual interaction decreased when the intensity of the interaction moved from a simple discussion of spiritual issues (33% agree) to physician silent prayer (28% agree) to physician prayer with a patient (19% agree; P < .001). Ten percent of patients were willing to give up time spent on medical issues in an office visit setting to discuss religious/spiritual issues with their physician. After controlling for age, gender, marital status, education, spirituality score, and health care utilization, African-American subjects were more likely to accept this time trade-off (odds ratio, 4.9; confidence interval, 2.1 to 11.7).CONCLUSION: Physicians should be aware that a substantial minority of patients desire spiritual interaction in routine office visits. When asked about specific prayer behaviors across a range of clinical scenarios, patient desire for spiritual interaction increased with increasing severity of illness setting and decreased when referring to more-intense spiritual interactions. For most patients, the routine office visit may not be the optimal setting for a physician-patient spiritual dialog.KEY WORDS: religion and medicine; physician-patient relations; primary health care. J GEN INTERN MED 2003;18:38±43.

Most primary care physicians surveyed would not initiate any involvement with patients' spirituality in the medical encounter except for the clinical setting of dying. If a patient requests involvement, however, most physicians express a willingness to comply, even if the request involves prayer.

Increased interest in the endophytic fungus, Acremonium coenophialum Morgan‐Jones & Gams, and its symbiotic inhabitance of tall fescue, Festuca arundinacea Schreb., has created the need for rapid and reliable ergovaline analysis in research and in extension service (for diagnosis). A simplified sample preparation method provides faster and more reproducible results for ergovaline quanitation in tall fescue. The method involves extraction with alkaline chloroform, purification with a silica gel solid‐phase chromatography column, and direct ergovaline analysis of methanol eluants by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with fluorescence detection. When compared with a previous method specific for tall fescue vegetative tissue, the simplified method reduced variability and increased recoveries of internal standard from 83 to 94% and of ergovaline from 82 to 93%. This method when used with automated HPLC equipment, permits analysis of 60 to 80 samples per day. Twenty tall fescue samples were analyzed by two separate laboratories using the simplified method; ergovaline results from each were regressed against the other. Ninety‐seven percent of the variability from one laboratory could be accounted for by analysis of the samples by the other, suggesting that the simplified method is highly reproducible.

Microsatellite or simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers have wide applicability for genetic analysis in crop plant improvement strategies. The objectives of this project were to isolate, characterize, and map a comprehensive set of SSR markers for maize (Zea mays L.). We developed 1051 novel SSR markers for maize from microsatellite-enriched libraries and by identification of microsatellite-containing sequences in public and private databases. Three mapping populations were used to derive map positions for 978 of these markers. The main mapping population was the intermated B73 x Mo17 (IBM) population. In mapping this intermated recombinant inbred line population, we have contributed to development of a new high-resolution map resource for maize. The primer sequences, original sequence sources, data on polymorphisms across 11 inbred lines, and map positions have been integrated with information on other public SSR markers and released through MaizeDB at URL:www.agron.missouri.edu. The maize research community now has the most detailed and comprehensive SSR marker set of any plant species.