Complete Genome Sequence of the Type Strain Corynebacterium testudinoris DSM 44614, Recovered from Necrotic Lesions in the Mouth of a Tortoise

The complete genome sequence of the type strain Corynebacterium testudinoris DSM 44614 from the mouth of a tortoise comprises 2,721,226 bp with a mean G+C content of 63.14%. The automatic annotation of the genome sequence revealed 4 rRNA operons, 51 tRNA genes, 7 other RNA genes, and 2,561 protein-coding regions.Medical Microbiology and Genomics fund (eKVV 200937)Germany. Federal Ministry of Education and Research (German Network for Bioinformatics Intrastructure Initiative FKZ 031A533A

Virulence Factor Genes Detected in the Complete Genome Sequence of Corynebacterium uterequi DSM 45634, Isolated from the Uterus of a Maiden Mare

The complete genome sequence of the type strain Corynebacterium uterequi DSM 45634 from an equine urogenital tract specimen comprises 2,419,437 bp and 2,163 protein-coding genes. Candidate virulence factors are homologs of DIP0733, DIP1281, and DIP1621 from Corynebacterium diphtheriae and of sialidase precursors from Trueperella pyogenes and Chlamydia trachomatis.Medical Microbiology and Genomics fund (eKVV 200937)Germany. Federal Ministry of Education and Research (German Network for Bioinformatics Intrastructure Initiative FKZ 031A533A

Delayed and Accelerated Aging Share Common Longevity Assurance Mechanisms

Mutant dwarf and calorie-restricted mice benefit from healthy aging and unusually long lifespan. In contrast, mouse models for DNA repair-deficient progeroid syndromes age and die prematurely. To identify mechanisms that regulate mammalian longevity, we quantified the parallels between the genome-wide liver expression profiles of mice with those two extremes of lifespan. Contrary to expectation, we find significant, genome-wide expression associations between the progeroid and long-lived mice. Subsequent analysis of significantly over-represented biological processes revealed suppression of the endocrine and energy pathways with increased stress responses in both delayed and premature aging. To test the relevance of these processes in natural aging, we compared the transcriptomes of liver, lung, kidney, and spleen over the entire murine adult lifespan and subsequently confirmed these findings on an independent aging cohort. The majority of genes showed similar expression changes in all four organs, indicating a systemic transcriptional response with aging. This systemic response included the same biological processes that are triggered in progeroid and long-lived mice. However, on a genome-wide scale, transcriptomes of naturally aged mice showed a strong association to progeroid but not to long-lived mice. Thus, endocrine and metabolic changes are indicative of “survival” responses to genotoxic stress or starvation, whereas genome-wide associations in gene expression with natural aging are indicative of biological age, which may thus delineate pro- and anti-aging effects of treatments aimed at health-span extension

Mosquito brains encode unique features of human odour to drive host seeking

A globally invasive form of the mosquito Aedes aegypti specializes in biting humans, making it an efficient disease vector(1). Host-seeking female mosquitoes strongly prefer human odour over the odour of animals(2,3), but exactly how they distinguish between the two is not known. Vertebrate odours are complex blends of volatile chemicals with many shared components(4-7), making discrimination an interesting sensory coding challenge. Here we show that human and animal odours evoke activity in distinct combinations of olfactory glomeruli within the Ae. aegypti antennal lobe. One glomerulus in particular is strongly activated by human odour but responds weakly, or not at all, to animal odour. This human-sensitive glomerulus is selectively tuned to the long-chain aldehydes decanal and undecanal, which we show are consistently enriched in human odour and which probably originate from unique human skin lipids. Using synthetic blends, we further demonstrate that signalling in the human-sensitive glomerulus significantly enhances long-range host-seeking behaviour in a wind tunnel, recapitulating preference for human over animal odours. Our research suggests that animal brains may distil complex odour stimuli of innate biological relevance into simple neural codes and reveals targets for the design of next-generation mosquito-control strategies

Learning structured representations from experience

How a system represents information tightly constrains the kinds of problems it can solve. Humans routinely solve problems that appear to require structured representations of stimulus properties and the relations between them. An account of how we might acquire such representations has central importance for theories of human cognition. We describe how a system can learn structured relational representations from initially unstructured inputs using comparison, sensitivity to time, and a modified Hebbian learning algorithm. We summarize how the model DORA (Discovery of Relations by Analogy) instantiates this approach, which we call predicate learning, as well as how the model captures several phenomena from cognitive development, relational reasoning, and language processing in the human brain. Predicate learning offers a link between models based on formal languages and models which learn from experience and provides an existence proof for how structured representations might be learned in the first place