Improved reference genome of Aedes aegypti informs arbovirus vector control

Female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes infect more than 400 million people each year with dangerous viral pathogens including dengue, yellow fever, Zika and chikungunya. Progress in understanding the biology of mosquitoes and developing the tools to fight them has been slowed by the lack of a high-quality genome assembly. Here we combine diverse technologies to produce the markedly improved, fully re-annotated AaegL5 genome assembly, and demonstrate how it accelerates mosquito science. We anchored physical and cytogenetic maps, doubled the number of known chemosensory ionotropic receptors that guide mosquitoes to human hosts and egg-laying sites, provided further insight into the size and composition of the sex-determining M locus, and revealed copy-number variation among glutathione S-transferase genes that are important for insecticide resistance. Using high-resolution quantitative trait locus and population genomic analyses, we mapped new candidates for dengue vector competence and insecticide resistance. AaegL5 will catalyse new biological insights and intervention strategies to fight this deadly disease vector

25th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS-2016

Abstracts of the 25th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS-2016 Seogwipo City, Jeju-do, South Korea. 2–7 July 201

Synthesis and thermal stability of cis-dichloro[(E)-ethyl-2-(2-((8-hydroxyquinolin-2-il)methylene)hidrazinyl)acetate-kappa(2) N]-palladium(II) complex

The structure of new cis-dichloro[(E)-ethyl-2-(2-((8-hydroxyquinolin-2-il)methylene)hidrazinyl)acetate-kappa(2) N]-palladium(II) complex was determined using a combination of XRD and IR measurements and DFT calculations. Inherent flexibility of its structure is evident from the complexity of its IR spectrum, which could only be theoretically reproduced as a combination of several closely related structures, involving rotation around C-O bond and changes in hydrogen interactions of its -OH group. Its thermal stability and decomposition were studied non-isothermally, and the thermal decomposition mechanism was proposed using correlation with DFT calculations at the molecular level. It was determined that the initial degradation step consists of the release of Cl free radical, which then reacts with both the initial compound and the degradation products. Besides the endothermic steps, there are exothermic ones, contributing to the complex shape of the DSC curve, consisted of overlapping endothermic and exothermic peaks. Deconvolution of DTG curve allowed identification of primary fragments of the initial degradation process and, in conjunction with DFT calculations, construction of the most likely reaction mechanism