Effect of human activities on biodiversity in Nabq Protected Area, South Sinai, Egypt

Nabq as “A Managed Resource Protected Area” or as “Multiple Use Management Area” is subjected to human activities that influence its biodiversity. Therefore, many field trips from January 2016 to January 2017 were carried out to detect the main activities in Nabq protectorate and their impacts on faunal macro-benthos biodiversity. Four stations representing two major habitats (mangrove and rocky shore) were chosen depending on anthropogenic activities. A total of 112 macro-benthos taxa were recorded in Nabq dominated with Planaxis salcatus, Nerita spp., Barbatia trapezina and Ophiocoma scolopendrina. The anthropogenic activities don't only affect the presence and absence of species, but also influence on the dominance status of species in the investigated stations. El-Rowayseaa and El-Dagal were unaffected stations showing more abundance and diversification than El-Gharkana and El-Monkateaa which were affected mangrove and rocky shore stations, respectively. In conclusion, anthropogenic activities are the main cause of recent changes to the marine biodiversity in Nabq Protected Area and their continuation may cause habitat damage. Keywords: Macro-benthos, Biodiversity, Human activities, Ecotourism, Fishing, Protected area

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale. Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter; identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation; analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution; describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity; and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes