Xenopus fraseri: Mr. Fraser, where did your frog come from?

A comprehensive, accurate, and revisable alpha taxonomy is crucial for biodiversity studies, but is challenging when data from reference specimens are difficult to collect or observe. However, recent technological advances can overcome some of these challenges. To illustrate this, we used modern approaches to tackle a centuries-old taxonomic enigma presented by Fraser’s Clawed Frog, Xenopus fraseri, including whether X. fraseri is different from other species, and if so, where it is situated geographically and phylogenetically. To facilitate these inferences, we used high-resolution techniques to examine morphological variation, and we generated and analyzed complete mitochondrial genome sequences from all Xenopus species, including >150-year-old type specimens. Our results demonstrate that X. fraseri is indeed distinct from other species, firmly place this species within a phylogenetic context, and identify its minimal geographic distribution in northern Ghana and northern Cameroon. These data also permit novel phylogenetic resolution into this intensively studied and biomedically important group. Xenopus fraseri was formerly thought to be a rainforest endemic placed alongside species in the amieti species group; in fact this species occurs in arid habitat on the borderlands of the Sahel, and is the smallest member of the muelleri species group. This study illustrates that the taxonomic enigma of Fraser’s frog was a combined consequence of sparse collection records, interspecies conservation and intraspecific polymorphism in external anatomy, and type specimens with unusual morphology

A frog with three sex chromosomes that co-mingle together in nature: Xenopus tropicalis has a degenerate W and a Y that evolved from a Z chromosome

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Furman, B. L. S., Cauret, C. M. S., Knytl, M., Song, X. Y., Premachandra, T., Ofori-Boateng, C., Jordan, D. C., Horb, M. E., & Evans, B. J. (2020). A frog with three sex chromosomes that co-mingle together in nature: Xenopus tropicalis has a degenerate W and a Y that evolved from a Z chromosome. PLoS Genetics, 16(11), e1009121, doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1009121.In many species, sexual differentiation is a vital prelude to reproduction, and disruption of this process can have severe fitness effects, including sterility. It is thus interesting that genetic systems governing sexual differentiation vary among—and even within—species. To understand these systems more, we investigated a rare example of a frog with three sex chromosomes: the Western clawed frog, Xenopus tropicalis. We demonstrate that natural populations from the western and eastern edges of Ghana have a young Y chromosome, and that a male-determining factor on this Y chromosome is in a very similar genomic location as a previously known female-determining factor on the W chromosome. Nucleotide polymorphism of expressed transcripts suggests genetic degeneration on the W chromosome, emergence of a new Y chromosome from an ancestral Z chromosome, and natural co-mingling of the W, Z, and Y chromosomes in the same population. Compared to the rest of the genome, a small sex-associated portion of the sex chromosomes has a 50-fold enrichment of transcripts with male-biased expression during early gonadal differentiation. Additionally, X. tropicalis has sex-differences in the rates and genomic locations of recombination events during gametogenesis that are similar to at least two other Xenopus species, which suggests that sex differences in recombination are genus-wide. These findings are consistent with theoretical expectations associated with recombination suppression on sex chromosomes, demonstrate that several characteristics of old and established sex chromosomes (e.g., nucleotide divergence, sex biased expression) can arise well before sex chromosomes become cytogenetically distinguished, and show how these characteristics can have lingering consequences that are carried forward through sex chromosome turnovers.This work was supported by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2017-05770) (BJE), Resource Allocation Competition awards from Compute Canada (BJE), the Whitman Center Fellowship Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory (BJE), the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University (BJE), and National Institutes of Health grants R01-HD084409 (MEH) and P40-OD010997 (MEH). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

An Instrumented Method for the Evaluation of Compressor Heat Losses in Heat Pumps On-Field

International audienc

Experimental Characterization of Fault Impacts on the Functioning Variables of an Inverter Driven Heat Pump

International audienceThe heat pump technology answers to the three key targets of the European Union climate action by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing renewable energy share and improving energy efficiency of buildings. In standard conditions, heat pumps can reach very high coefficients of performance (COPs). However, the in-situ COPs are poorly known and they depend on many factors such as sizing, climate, quality of installation, and can also be affected by some abnormal functioning caused by faults, such as heat exchanger fouling or incorrect refrigerant charge. This paper focuses on the characterization of these faults for an inverter driven residential heat pump, for which literature is very limited, in order to be able to detect those as early as possible, and thus to facilitate maintenance operation. A series of experimental tests has been conducted to generate correlations between faults and their impact on the main functioning variables and performances. The test results obtained are presented and discussed. Further steps required to develop an operational automated fault detection and diagnostic method for inverter driven heat pumps are finally discussed, as well as the possibility to associate it with a performance assessment method for heat pumps that was previously developed and validated

Functional dissection and assembly of a small, newly evolved, W chromosome-specific genomic region of the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis.

Genetic triggers for sex determination are frequently co-inherited with other linked genes that may also influence one or more sex-specific phenotypes. To better understand how sex-limited regions evolve and function, we studied a small W chromosome-specific region of the frog Xenopus laevis that contains only three genes (dm-w, scan-w, ccdc69-w) and that drives female differentiation. Using gene editing, we found that the sex-determining function of this region requires dm-w but that scan-w and ccdc69-w are not essential for viability, female development, or fertility. Analysis of mesonephros+gonad transcriptomes during sexual differentiation illustrates masculinization of the dm-w knockout transcriptome, and identifies mostly non-overlapping sets of differentially expressed genes in separate knockout lines for each of these three W-specific gene compared to wildtype sisters. Capture sequencing of almost all Xenopus species and PCR surveys indicate that the female-determining function of dm-w is present in only a subset of species that carry this gene. These findings map out a dynamic evolutionary history of a newly evolved W chromosome-specific genomic region, whose components have distinctive functions that frequently degraded during Xenopus diversification, and evidence the evolutionary consequences of recombination suppression