Systemic and immune manifestations in myelodysplasia: a multicenter retrospective study

OBJECTIVE: The presence of systemic and/or immune manifestations in myelodysplasia has been currently reported. The influence of these manifestations on the natural outcome of myelodysplastic syndrome has to be considered. We present a multicenter retrospective study (2002-2009) of patients with myelodysplastic syndrome disclosing systemic and/or immune manifestations. METHODS: Forty-six patients with myelodysplasia presenting with systemic and/or immune manifestations were compared in terms of survival with 189 patients with myelodysplasia lacking these features. RESULTS: The clinical picture in these cases consisted of fever (13%), arthralgia or arthritis (13%), and cutaneous manifestations (67%). Four cases of systemic vasculitis have been reported in our series, and they have a worse prognosis. Immune anomalies were recorded in 29% of the cases, and the presence of cryoglobulins was also associated with a worse prognosis. CONCLUSION: A difference in survival between patients with myelodysplastic syndrome with systemic manifestations and patients lacking these manifestations has been observed in the presence of systemic vasculitis and/or cryoglobulins

Assessment of Groundnut Elite Lines under Drought Conditions and Selection of Tolerance Associated Traits

Investigation of groundnut genotypes response to drought stress could contribute to improving drought tolerance and productivity. The objective of this study was to investigate new improved groundnut varieties response to drought stress under controlled conditions to identify tolerant materials and drought tolerance related traits.Thus, three experiments were conducted during offseasons: two experiments in lysimetric system in 2017 and 2018 and one experiment in pots in 2017, to assess twelve varieties in a randomized complete block design with 2 water regimes and 4 replications.The water regimes were a full irrigation (WW) and an intermittent drought imposed at flowering times (WS). The investigated morphophysiological traits like transpiration, specific leaf area, root dry matter, root length density, and yield components decreased underWS. Significant year effect and genotypic variation were observed on most of investigated traits. Genotypes ICGV 92206 and ICGV 06319 showed low transpiration and revealed high pod yielding and early maturing genotypes under both water regimes, while genotypes ICGV 92035, ICGV 92195, ICGV 02038, ICGV 07211, and ICGV 07210 were drought-sensitive for pods production but produced high haulm under both water regimes. ICGV 92206, ICGV 02005, ICGV 02125, and ICGV 06319 showed higher yielding than 55-437 and Fleur 11. In this study, low total transpiration to control water loss, chlorophyll content, and root length density revealed drought tolerance associated traits for pod production, while TTW, TE, RDW, and RV revealed drought tolerance associated traits for fodder production

Development of novel multiplex microsatellite polymerase chain reactions to enable high-throughput population genetic studies of Schistosoma haematobium

© 2015 Webster et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. The attached file is the published version of the article

Although drought intensity increases aflatoxin contamination, drought tolerance does not lead to less aflatoxin contamination

Drought stress is known to increase aflatoxin contamination in groundnut and establishing a possible relationship between drought tolerance and resistance to aflatoxin contamination could contribute to a more efficient selection of aflatoxin-resistant genotypes. In recent work, the reference collection of groundnut had been assessed across seasons varying for drought intensity, i.e. two moderate temperature (rainy season) and two high temperature (dry season) experiments under well-watered (WW) and water stress (WS) conditions (Hamidou et al., 2012 and Hamidou et al., 2013). Here aflatoxin concentration (AC) in seeds is measured in these trials, first for possibly identifying germplasm with low aflatoxin concentrations and second for investigating possible relationships between aflatoxin concentration and drought tolerance. Drought stress intensity increased aflatoxin concentration in seeds and higher aflatoxin contamination was observed under combined drought and high temperature conditions than under drought alone. No germplasm with lower AC than resistant check (55-437) were found. Aflatoxin contamination showed very high GxE interactions, which suggest that selection for resistance to aflatoxin contamination must be specific to environment. Across trials, using means for each environment, there was a clear positive relationship between the aflatoxin concentration and the grain yield reduction due to drought, indicating that a higher drought severity led to higher aflatoxin concentration. However, within trial, the same relationships applied to individual genotypes, or to cohorts of tolerant/sensitive genotypes, were not significant. The major conclusion of this work is that while drought intensity did increase the level of aflatoxin contamination, as expected and previously reported, there seemed to be no direct relationship between tolerance to drought and aflatoxin concentration, suggesting that the mechanisms of drought tolerance and aflatoxin contamination are likely not common

Effects of early mycorrhization and colonized root length on low-soil-phosphorus resistance of West African pearl millet

Phosphorus (P) deficiency at early seedling stages is a critical determinant for survival and final yield of pearl millet in multi-stress Sahelian environments. Longer roots and colonization with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) enhance P uptake and crop performance of millet. Assessing the genotypic variation of early mycorrhization and its effect on plant growth is necessary to better understand mechanisms of resistance to low soil P and to use them in breeding strategies for low P. Therefore, in this study, eight pearl millet varieties contrasting in low-P resistance were grown in pots under low P (no additional P supply) and high P (+ 0.4 g P pot−1) conditions, and harvested 2, 4, 6, and 8 weeks after sowing (WAS). Root length was calculated 2 WAS by scanning of dissected roots and evaluation with WinRhizo software. AM infection (%) and P uptake (shoot P concentration multiplied per shoot dry matter) were measured at each harvest. Across harvests under low P (3.3 mg Bray P kg−1), resistant genotypes had greater total root length infected with AMF (837 m), higher percentage of AMF colonization (11.6%), and increased P uptake (69.4 mg P plant−1) than sensitive genotypes (177 m, 7.1% colonization and 46.4 mg P plant−1, respectively). Two WAS, resistant genotypes were infected almost twice as much as sensitive ones (4.1% and 2.1%) and the individual resistant genotypes differed in the percentage of AMF infection. AMF colonization was positively related to final dry matter production in pots, which corresponded to field performance. Early mycorrhization enhanced P uptake in pearl millet grown under P-deficient conditions, with the genotypic variation for this parameter allowing selection for better performance under field conditions

Ancient hybridization and adaptive introgression of an invadolysin gene in schistosome parasites

Introgression among parasite species has the potential to transfer traits of biomedical importance across species boundaries. The parasitic blood fluke Schistosoma haematobium causes urogenital schistosomiasis in humans across sub-Saharan Africa. Hybridization with other schistosome species is assumed to occur commonly, because genetic crosses between S. haematobium and livestock schistosomes, including S. bovis, can be staged in the laboratory, and sequencing of mtDNA and rDNA amplified from microscopic miracidia larvae frequently reveals markers from different species. However the frequency, direction, age and genomic consequences of hybridization are unknown. We hatched miracidia from eggs, and sequenced the exomes from 96 individual S. haematobium miracidia from infected patients from Niger and the Zanzibar archipelago. These data revealed no evidence for contemporary hybridization between S. bovis and S. haematobium in our samples. However, all Nigerien S. haematobium genomes sampled show hybrid ancestry, with 3.3-8.2% of their nuclear genomes derived from S. bovis, providing evidence of an ancient, introgression event that occurred at least 108-613 generations ago. Some S. bovis derived alleles have spread to high frequency or reached fixation and show strong signatures of directional selection; the strongest signal spans a single gene in the invadolysin gene family (Chr. 4). Our results suggest that S. bovis/S. haematobium hybridization occurs rarely, but demonstrate profound consequences of ancient introgression from a livestock parasite into the genome of S. haematobium, the most prevalent schistosome species infecting humans