Tasting Soil Fungal Diversity with Earth Tongues: Phylogenetic Test of SATé Alignments for Environmental ITS Data

An abundance of novel fungal lineages have been indicated by DNA sequencing of the nuclear ribosomal ITS region from environmental samples such as soil and wood. Although phylogenetic analysis of these novel lineages is a key component of unveiling the structure and diversity of complex communities, such analyses are rare for environmental ITS data due to the difficulties of aligning this locus across significantly divergent taxa. One potential approach to this issue is simultaneous alignment and tree estimation. We targeted divergent ITS sequences of the earth tongue fungi (Geoglossomycetes), a basal class in the Ascomycota, to assess the performance of SATé, recent software that combines progressive alignment and tree building. We found that SATé performed well in generating high-quality alignments and in accurately estimating the phylogeny of earth tongue fungi. Drawing from a data set of 300 sequences of earth tongues and progressively more distant fungal lineages, 30 insufficiently identified ITS sequences from the public sequence databases were assigned to the Geoglossomycetes. The association between earth tongues and plants has been hypothesized for a long time, but hard evidence is yet to be collected. The ITS phylogeny showed that four ectomycorrhizal isolates shared a clade with Geoglossum but not with Trichoglossum earth tongues, pointing to the significant potential inherent to ecological data mining of environmental samples. Environmental sampling holds the key to many focal questions in mycology, and simultaneous alignment and tree estimation, as performed by SATé, can be a highly efficient companion in that pursuit

Painful and painless mutations of SCN9A and SCN11A voltage-gated sodium channels

Chronic pain is a global problem affecting up to 20% of the world’s population and has a significant economic, social and personal cost to society. Sensory neurons of the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) detect noxious stimuli and transmit this sensory information to regions of the central nervous system (CNS) where activity is perceived as pain. DRG neurons express multiple voltage-gated sodium channels that underlie their excitability. Research over the last 20 years has provided valuable insights into the critical roles that two channels, NaV1.7 and NaV1.9, play in pain signalling in man. Gain of function mutations in NaV1.7 cause painful conditions while loss of function mutations cause complete insensitivity to pain. Only gain of function mutations have been reported for NaV1.9. However, while most NaV1.9 mutations lead to painful conditions, a few are reported to cause insensitivity to pain. The critical roles these channels play in pain along with their low expression in the CNS and heart muscle suggest they are valid targets for novel analgesic drugs

Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger

On 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of ~1.7 s with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg2 at a luminosity distance of 40+8-8 Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 Mo. An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at ~40 Mpc) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One- Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ~10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position ~9 and ~16 days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta