Candidate Gene Screen in the Red Flour Beetle Tribolium Reveals Six3 as Ancient Regulator of Anterior Median Head and Central Complex Development

Several highly conserved genes play a role in anterior neural plate patterning of vertebrates and in head and brain patterning of insects. However, head involution in Drosophila has impeded a systematic identification of genes required for insect head formation. Therefore, we use the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum in order to comprehensively test the function of orthologs of vertebrate neural plate patterning genes for a function in insect head development. RNAi analysis reveals that most of these genes are indeed required for insect head capsule patterning, and we also identified several genes that had not been implicated in this process before. Furthermore, we show that Tc-six3/optix acts upstream of Tc-wingless, Tc-orthodenticle1, and Tc-eyeless to control anterior median development. Finally, we demonstrate that Tc-six3/optix is the first gene known to be required for the embryonic formation of the central complex, a midline-spanning brain part connected to the neuroendocrine pars intercerebralis. These functions are very likely conserved among bilaterians since vertebrate six3 is required for neuroendocrine and median brain development with certain mutations leading to holoprosencephaly

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Not AvailableIn this study, we report the complete genome sequencing of the Duck plague virus from India for the first time. The sequencing was done on the MinION nanopore sequencer from Oxford Nanopore Technologies. The closest relative is the European strain 2085v, with 99.98 and 99.8% identity at the amino acid and nucleotide level respectively. Moreover, 72 out of 77 ORFs are completely conserved between the 2 strains. The high similarity with the European strain over the only three other pathogenic strains reported from China points to the circulation of European strain in India. The fly pathways of migratory birds and co-habitation with native species being a probable reason. More complete genome data from diverse sampling locations are needed to characterize the genomic features, develop diagnostics, vaccines, and understand the evolution of the virus.Not Availabl

Discordancy tests for two-parameter exponential samples

[[abstract]]The inside-out sequential procedures for testing up to k upper outliers in a two-parameter exponential sample are investigated. Six test statistics, one based on the ratio of the difference of largest observation and the sample mean which are unsuspected to be outliers to the range of these observations, and others used for block test procedures discussed in Basu (J Am Stat Assoc 60:548–559, 1965), Balasooriya and Gadag (J Stat Comput Simul 50:249–259, 1994), Zerbet and Nikulin (Commun Stat Theory Methods 32:573–583, 2003) and Kumar (Testing for suspected observations in an exponential sample with unknown origin, 2013), are considered. Utilizing the recursion of Huffer (J Appl Probab 25:346–354, 1988) and algorithm of Lin and Balakrishnan (Comput Stat Data Anal 53:3281–3290, 2009), the critical values of the joint null distributions of these test statistics for sequential testing discordancy of k upper outliers in two-parameter exponential samples on the important cases k=2 and 3 are obtained. We also propose a simple procedure to determine k, which can reduce the masking or swamping effect. Powers of tests based on these statistics are compared through a Monte Carlo study.[[notice]]補正完