Nomenclature and Comparative Morphology of the Teneurin/TCAP/ADGRL Protein Families

The teneurins are a family of glycosylated type II transmembrane proteins synthesized in several tissue from both vertebrate and invertebrate species. These proteins interact with the latrophilins, a group of adhesion G protein-coupled receptors. Both teneurins and latrophilins may have been acquired by choanoflagellates through horizontal gene transfer from a toxin-target system present in prokaryotes. Teneurins are highly conserved in eukaryotes, with four paralogs (TEN1, TEN2, TEN3, and TEN4) in most vertebrates playing a role in the normal neural development, axonal guiding, synapse formation and synaptic maintenance. In this review, we summarize the main findings concerning the distribution and morphology of the teneurins and latrophilins, both during development and in adult animals. We also briefly discuss the current knowledge in the distribution of the teneurin C-terminal associated protein (TCAP), a peptidergic sequence at the terminal portion of teneurins that may be independently processed and secreted. Through the analysis of anatomical data, we draw parallels to the evolution of those proteins and the increasing complexity of this system, which mirrors the increase in metazoan sensory complexity. This review underscores the need for further studies investigating the distribution of teneurins and latrophilins and the use of different animal models

Vav3 Is Involved in GABAergic Axon Guidance Events Important for the Proper Function of Brainstem Neurons Controlling Cardiovascular, Respiratory, and Renal Parameters

Vav3 is a phosphorylation GDP/GTP exchange factor for Rho/Rac GTPases. Recently, it has been described that Vav3 knockout mice develop hypertension and sympathoexcitation. In this work, we report the neurological cause of this phenotype

Whole-genome sequencing of 1,171 elderly admixed individuals from Brazil

As whole-genome sequencing (WGS) becomes the gold standard tool for studying population genomics and medical applications, data on diverse non-European and admixed individuals are still scarce. Here, we present a high-coverage WGS dataset of 1,171 highly admixed elderly Brazilians from a census-based cohort, providing over 76 million variants, of which ~2 million are absent from large public databases. WGS enables identification of ~2,000 previously undescribed mobile element insertions without previous description, nearly 5 Mb of genomic segments absent from the human genome reference, and over 140 alleles from HLA genes absent from public resources. We reclassify and curate pathogenicity assertions for nearly four hundred variants in genes associated with dominantly-inherited Mendelian disorders and calculate the incidence for selected recessive disorders, demonstrating the clinical usefulness of the present study. Finally, we observe that whole-genome and HLA imputation could be significantly improved compared to available datasets since rare variation represents the largest proportion of input from WGS. These results demonstrate that even smaller sample sizes of underrepresented populations bring relevant data for genomic studies, especially when exploring analyses allowed only by WGS