1,296 research outputs found
Evolution of glyoxylate cycle enzymes in Metazoa: evidence of multiple horizontal transfer events and pseudogene formation
BACKGROUND: The glyoxylate cycle is thought to be present in bacteria, protists, plants, fungi, and nematodes, but not in other Metazoa. However, activity of the glyoxylate cycle enzymes, malate synthase (MS) and isocitrate lyase (ICL), in animal tissues has been reported. In order to clarify the status of the MS and ICL genes in animals and get an insight into their evolution, we undertook a comparative-genomic study. RESULTS: Using sequence similarity searches, we identified MS genes in arthropods, echinoderms, and vertebrates, including platypus and opossum, but not in the numerous sequenced genomes of placental mammals. The regions of the placental mammals' genomes expected to code for malate synthase, as determined by comparison of the gene orders in vertebrate genomes, show clear similarity to the opossum MS sequence but contain stop codons, indicating that the MS gene became a pseudogene in placental mammals. By contrast, the ICL gene is undetectable in animals other than the nematodes that possess a bifunctional, fused ICL-MS gene. Examination of phylogenetic trees of MS and ICL suggests multiple horizontal gene transfer events that probably went in both directions between several bacterial and eukaryotic lineages. The strongest evidence was obtained for the acquisition of the bifunctional ICL-MS gene from an as yet unknown bacterial source with the corresponding operonic organization by the common ancestor of the nematodes. CONCLUSION: The distribution of the MS and ICL genes in animals suggests that either they encode alternative enzymes of the glyoxylate cycle that are not orthologous to the known MS and ICL or the animal MS acquired a new function that remains to be characterized. Regardless of the ultimate solution to this conundrum, the genes for the glyoxylate cycle enzymes present a remarkable variety of evolutionary events including unusual horizontal gene transfer from bacteria to animals. REVIEWERS: Arcady Mushegian (Stowers Institute for Medical Research), Andrey Osterman (Burnham Institute for Medical Research), Chris Ponting (Oxford University)
HYPERTENSION IN POSTMENOPAUSAL WOMEN: POSSIBILITIES OF COMBINATION THERAPY
Objective â to study the efficacy and safety of Tenoten in the combination therapy of hypertension in early postmenopausal women.Subjects and methods. The study enrolled 60 early postmenopausal women with grade IâII hypertension. A study group included 30 women who took Tenoten during antihypertensive therapy (AHT); a control group comprised 30 women who received AHT only.Results. Tenoten could achieve additional improvement of 24-hour blood pressure (BP) monitoring data in the postmenopausal hypertensive women. Tenoten was found to have a positive effect on general health, activity, and mood and to alleviate the symptoms of autonomic dysfunction and anxiety.Conclusion. Tenoten that is able to alleviate the manifestations of anxiety and autonomic dysfunction, to exert a positive effect on bloodpressure values, and to improves health, mood, and social activity should be used in addition to AGT.</p
The statistical mechanics of a polygenic characterunder stabilizing selection, mutation and drift
By exploiting an analogy between population genetics and statistical
mechanics, we study the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing
selection, mutation, and genetic drift. This requires us to track only four
macroscopic variables, instead of the distribution of all the allele
frequencies that influence the trait. These macroscopic variables are the
expectations of: the trait mean and its square, the genetic variance, and of a
measure of heterozygosity, and are derived from a generating function that is
in turn derived by maximizing an entropy measure. These four macroscopics are
enough to accurately describe the dynamics of the trait mean and of its genetic
variance (and in principle of any other quantity). Unlike previous approaches
that were based on an infinite series of moments or cumulants, which had to be
truncated arbitrarily, our calculations provide a well-defined approximation
procedure. We apply the framework to abrupt and gradual changes in the optimum,
as well as to changes in the strength of stabilizing selection. Our
approximations are surprisingly accurate, even for systems with as few as 5
loci. We find that when the effects of drift are included, the expected genetic
variance is hardly altered by directional selection, even though it fluctuates
in any particular instance. We also find hysteresis, showing that even after
averaging over the microscopic variables, the macroscopic trajectories retain a
memory of the underlying genetic states.Comment: 35 pages, 8 figure
DADA: data assimilation for the detection and attribution of weather and climate-related events
A new nudging method for data assimilation, delayâcoordinate nudging, is presented. Delayâcoordinate nudging makes explicit use of present and past observations in the formulation of the forcing driving the model evolution at each time step. Numerical experiments with a lowâorder chaotic system show that the new method systematically outperforms standard nudging in different model and observational scenarios, also when using an unoptimized formulation of the delayânudging coefficients. A connection between the optimal delay and the dominant Lyapunov exponent of the dynamics is found based on heuristic arguments and is confirmed by the numerical results, providing a guideline for the practical implementation of the algorithm. Delayâcoordinate nudging preserves the easiness of implementation, the intuitive functioning and the reduced computational cost of the standard nudging, making it a potential alternative especially in the field of seasonalâtoâdecadal predictions with large Earth system models that limit the use of more sophisticated data assimilation procedures
Analytical study of the effect of recombination on evolution via DNA shuffling
We investigate a multi-locus evolutionary model which is based on the DNA
shuffling protocol widely applied in \textit{in vitro} directed evolution. This
model incorporates selection, recombination and point mutations. The simplicity
of the model allows us to obtain a full analytical treatment of both its
dynamical and equilibrium properties, for the case of an infinite population.
We also briefly discuss finite population size corrections
A Strong Deletion Bias in Nonallelic Gene Conversion
Gene conversion is the unidirectional transfer of genetic information between orthologous (allelic) or paralogous (nonallelic) genomic segments. Though a number of studies have examined nucleotide replacements, little is known about length difference mutations produced by gene conversion. Here, we investigate insertions and deletions produced by nonallelic gene conversion in 338 Drosophila and 10,149 primate paralogs. Using a direct phylogenetic approach, we identify 179 insertions and 614 deletions in Drosophila paralogs, and 132 insertions and 455 deletions in primate paralogs. Thus, nonallelic gene conversion is strongly deletion-biased in both lineages, with almost 3.5 times as many conversion-induced deletions as insertions. In primates, the deletion bias is considerably stronger for long indels and, in both lineages, the per-site rate of gene conversion is orders of magnitudes higher than that of ordinary mutation. Due to this high rate, deletion-biased nonallelic gene conversion plays a key role in genome size evolution, leading to the cooperative shrinkage and eventual disappearance of selectively neutral paralogs
Search for Gravitational-wave Inspiral Signals Associated with Short Gamma-ray Bursts During LIGO's Fifth and Virgo's First Science Run
Progenitor scenarios for short gamma-ray bursts (short GRBs) include coalescenses of two neutron stars or a neutron star and black hole, which would necessarily be accompanied by the emission of strong gravitational waves. We present a search for these known gravitational-wave signatures in temporal and directional coincidence with 22 GRBs that had sufficient gravitational-wave data available in multiple instruments during LIGO's fifth science run, S5, and Virgo's first science run, VSR1. We find no statistically significant gravitational-wave candidates within a [ â 5, + 1) s window around the trigger time of any GRB. Using the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney U-test, we find no evidence for an excess of weak gravitational-wave signals in our sample of GRBs. We exclude neutron star-black hole progenitors to a median 90% confidence exclusion distance of 6.7 Mpc
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