Early-stage animal hoarders: are these owners of large numbers of adequately cared for cats?

Animal hoarding is a spectrum-based condition in which hoarders are often reported to have had normal and appropriate pet-keeping habits in childhood and early adulthood. Historically, research has focused largely on well established clinical animal hoarders, with little work targeted towards the onset and development of animal hoarding. This study investigated whether a Brazilian population of owners of what might typically be considered an excessive number of cats (20 or more) were more likely to share the commonly reported psychological and demographic profile of animal hoarders than owners of one to two cats drawn from the same population. Psychological traits measured were attachment to pets (Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale), anxiety, depression (Hospitalized Anxiety and Depression Scale) and hoarding behaviour (Saving Inventory-Revised). Owners of 20 or more cats were significantly older (P <0.001), displayed significantly higher pet attachment scores (P <0.01), and displayed significant correlations between hoarding behaviour and anxiety (P <0.001), and hoarding behaviour and depression (P <0.05). Such a profile demonstrates greater similarities to clinical animal hoarders than to typical cat owners on these particular measures, although additional disparities with clinical animal hoarders exist in the areas of functioning, veterinary care and home organisation.Taking this information together, the studied population may represent the understudied group of early-stage animal hoarders. However, external factors such as culture and societal animal control policies should not be overlooked at this stage as alternative explanations for pet keeping at levels that might be considered excessive.</p

Graphic representation of the correlation matrices of phenotype values for the (A) dry season, and (B) wet season.

<p>Graphic representation of the correlation matrices of phenotype values for the (A) dry season, and (B) wet season.</p

Genome-Wide Association Mapping for Yield and Other Agronomic Traits in an Elite Breeding Population of Tropical Rice (<i>Oryza sativa</i>)

<div><p>Genome-wide association mapping studies (GWAS) are frequently used to detect QTL in diverse collections of crop germplasm, based on historic recombination events and linkage disequilibrium across the genome. Generally, diversity panels genotyped with high density SNP panels are utilized in order to assay a wide range of alleles and haplotypes and to monitor recombination breakpoints across the genome. By contrast, GWAS have not generally been performed in breeding populations. In this study we performed association mapping for 19 agronomic traits including yield and yield components in a breeding population of elite irrigated tropical rice breeding lines so that the results would be more directly applicable to breeding than those from a diversity panel. The population was genotyped with 71,710 SNPs using genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS), and GWAS performed with the explicit goal of expediting selection in the breeding program. Using this breeding panel we identified 52 QTL for 11 agronomic traits, including large effect QTLs for flowering time and grain length/grain width/grain-length-breadth ratio. We also identified haplotypes that can be used to select plants in our population for short stature (plant height), early flowering time, and high yield, and thus demonstrate the utility of association mapping in breeding populations for informing breeding decisions. We conclude by exploring how the newly identified significant SNPs and insights into the genetic architecture of these quantitative traits can be leveraged to build genomic-assisted selection models.</p></div

Description of phenotypes and phenotyping.

<p>Description of phenotypes and phenotyping.</p

Physical map of significant GWAS QTL.

<p>Black points—jittered GBS SNPs, red triangles—physical position of the most significant SNP for a given peak, blue rectangles—physical position of candidate flowering time genes.</p

Selected Manhattan plots for flowering time (FLW, top), length-breadth ratio (LBR, top middle), plant height (PH, bottom middle), and grain yield (YLD, bottom).

<p>Dashed line shows the 0.1 FDR significance threshold.</p

Phenotypic distributions for flowering time in the dry season (top), plant height in the dry season (middle), and yield in the wet season (bottom), showing the most desirable 5% of individuals (red) and least desirable 5% of individuals (blue).

<p>The most significant haplotypes associated with each end of the distribution are shown to the left and right of the histogram with the number of individuals in the best or worst 5% that carry the respective haplotypes. "Confirmed other" refers to individuals that were known NOT to carry the most significant haplotype. Individuals that were neither confirmed to carry the significant haplotype or confirmed to carry other haplotypes had missing data at one or more SNPs that did not preclude the possibility of the individual carrying the significant haplotype.</p