Coat colours in the Massese sheep breed are associated with mutations in the agouti signalling protein (ASIP) and melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) genes

Massese is an Italian dairy sheep breed characterized by animals with black skin and horns and black or apparent grey hairs. Owing to the presence of these two coat colour types, this breed can be considered an interesting model to evaluate the effects of coat colour gene polymorphisms on this phenotypic trait. Two main loci have been already shown to affect coat colour in sheep: Agouti and Extension coding for the agouti signalling protein (ASIP) and melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) genes, respectively. The Agouti locus is affected by a large duplication including the ASIP gene that may determine the Agouti white and tan allele (AWt). Other disrupting or partially inactivating mutations have been identified in exon 2 (a deletion of 5 bp, D5; and a deletion of 9 bp, D9) and in exon 4 (g.5172T.A, p.C126S) of the ASIP gene. Three missense mutations in the sheep MC1R gene cause the dominant black ED allele (p.M73K and p.D121N) and the putative recessive e allele (p.R67C). Here, we analysed these ASIP and MC1R mutations in 161 Massese sheep collected from four flocks. The presence of one duplicated copy allele including the ASIP gene was associated with grey coat colour (P59.4E-30). Almost all animals with a duplicated copy allele (37 out of 41) showed uniform apparent grey hair and almost all animals without a duplicated allele (117 out of 120) were completely black. Different forms of duplicated alleles were identified in Massese sheep including, in almost all cases, copies with exon 2 disrupting or partially inactivating mutations making these alleles different from the AWt allele. A few exceptions were observed in the association between ASIP polymorphisms and coat colour: three grey sheep did not carry any duplicated copy allele and four black animals carried a duplicated copy allele. Of the latter four sheep, two carried the ED allele of the MC1R gene that may be the cause of their black coat colour. The coat colour of all other black animals may be determined by non-functional ASIP alleles (non-agouti alleles, Aa) and in a few cases by the ED Extension allele. At least three frequent ASIP haplotypes ([D5:g.5172T], [N:g.5172A] and [D5:g.5172A]) were detected (organized into six different diplotypes). In conclusion, the results indicated that coat colours in the Massese sheep breed are mainly derived by combining ASIP and MC1R mutations

Effect of different pre-slaughter procedures on behavioural and blood parameters in pigs.

The effect of different pre-slaughter procedures on behavioural and blood parameters were evaluated on 120 pigs reared in one farm and delivered in groups of 40 subjects to three slaughterouses. Due to the different attitude of the personnel involved, differences in handling were evident at loading and at unloading where the difficulties to srive the pigs incresed the behaviuoral events. Blood analysis parameter showed that different resting time did not reduce the physical stress exoerienced by the pigs, which seems related "per se" to loading, transport and unloading and not to the different handling applied in each slaughter plant

Ab initio Hartree-Fock Born effective charges of LiH, LiF, LiCl, NaF, and NaCl

We use the Berry-phase-based theory of macroscopic polarization of dielectric crystals formulated in terms of Wannier functions, and state-of-the-art Gaussian basis functions, to obtain benchmark ab initio Hartree-Fock values of the Born effective charges of ionic compounds LiH, LiF, LiCl, NaF, and NaCl. We find excellent agreement with the experimental values for all the compounds except LiCl and NaCl, for which the disagreement with the experiments is close to 10% and 16%, respectively. This may imply the importance of many-body effects in those systems.Comment: 11 pages, Revtex, 2 figures (included), to appear in Phys. Rev. B April 15, 200

IgG1 Fc N-glycan galactosylation as a biomarker for immune activation.

Immunoglobulin G (IgG) Fc N-glycosylation affects antibody-mediated effector functions and varies with inflammation rooted in both communicable and non-communicable diseases. Worldwide, communicable and non-communicable diseases tend to segregate geographically. Therefore, we studied whether IgG Fc N-glycosylation varies in populations with different environmental exposures in different parts of the world. IgG Fc N-glycosylation was analysed in serum/plasma of 700 school-age children from different communities of Gabon, Ghana, Ecuador, the Netherlands and Germany. IgG1 galactosylation levels were generally higher in more affluent countries and in more urban communities. High IgG1 galactosylation levels correlated with low total IgE levels, low C-reactive protein levels and low prevalence of parasitic infections. Linear mixed modelling showed that only positivity for parasitic infections was a significant predictor of reduced IgG1 galactosylation levels. That IgG1 galactosylation is a predictor of immune activation is supported by the observation that asthmatic children seemed to have reduced IgG1 galactosylation levels as well. This indicates that IgG1 galactosylation levels could be used as a biomarker for immune activation of populations, providing a valuable tool for studies examining the epidemiological transition from communicable to non-communicable diseases

Authoritative subspecies diagnosis tool for European honey bees based on ancestryinformative SNPs

Background With numerous endemic subspecies representing four of its five evolutionary lineages, Europe holds a large fraction of Apis mellifera genetic diversity. This diversity and the natural distribution range have been altered by anthropogenic factors. The conservation of this natural heritage relies on the availability of accurate tools for subspecies diagnosis. Based on pool-sequence data from 2145 worker bees representing 22 populations sampled across Europe, we employed two highly discriminative approaches (PCA and F-ST) to select the most informative SNPs for ancestry inference. Results Using a supervised machine learning (ML) approach and a set of 3896 genotyped individuals, we could show that the 4094 selected single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provide an accurate prediction of ancestry inference in European honey bees. The best ML model was Linear Support Vector Classifier (Linear SVC) which correctly assigned most individuals to one of the 14 subspecies or different genetic origins with a mean accuracy of 96.2% +/- 0.8 SD. A total of 3.8% of test individuals were misclassified, most probably due to limited differentiation between the subspecies caused by close geographical proximity, or human interference of genetic integrity of reference subspecies, or a combination thereof. Conclusions The diagnostic tool presented here will contribute to a sustainable conservation and support breeding activities in order to preserve the genetic heritage of European honey bees.The SmartBees project was funded by the European Commission under its FP7 KBBE programme (2013.1.3-02, SmartBees Grant Agreement number 613960) https://ec.europa.eu/research/fp7.MP was supported by a Basque Government grant (IT1233-19). The funders provided the financial support to the research, but had no role in the design of the study, analysis, interpretations of data and in writing the manuscript

Glycobiology of cell death: when glycans and lectins govern cell fate

Although one typically thinks of carbohydrates as associated with cell growth and viability, glycosylation also has an integral role in many processes leading to cell death. Glycans, either alone or complexed with glycan-binding proteins, can deliver intracellular signals or control extracellular processes that promote initiation, execution and resolution of cell death programs. Herein, we review the role of glycans and glycan-binding proteins as essential components of the cell death machinery during physiologic and pathologic settings.Fil: Lichtenstein, Rachel. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Faculty of Engineering. Department of Biotechnology Engineering; IsraelFil: Rabinovich, Gabriel Adrian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental (i); Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Cs.exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Quimica Biologica; Argentin