Press Reports of Animal Hoarding

This article explores how the press reports nonhuman animal hoarding and hoarders. It discusses how 100 articles from 1995 to the present were content analyzed. Analysis revealed five emotional themes that include drama, revulsion, sympathy, indignation, and humor. While these themes draw readers\u27 attention and make disparate facts behind cases understandable by packaging them in familiar formats, they also present an inconsistent picture of animal hoarding that can confuse readers about the nature and significance of this behavior as well as animal abuse, more generally

ReCombine: A Suite of Programs for Detection and Analysis of Meiotic Recombination in Whole-Genome Datasets

In meiosis, the exchange of DNA between chromosomes by homologous recombination is a critical step that ensures proper chromosome segregation and increases genetic diversity. Products of recombination include reciprocal exchanges, known as crossovers, and non-reciprocal gene conversions or non-crossovers. The mechanisms underlying meiotic recombination remain elusive, largely because of the difficulty of analyzing large numbers of recombination events by traditional genetic methods. These traditional methods are increasingly being superseded by high-throughput techniques capable of surveying meiotic recombination on a genome-wide basis. Next-generation sequencing or microarray hybridization is used to genotype thousands of polymorphic markers in the progeny of hybrid yeast strains. New computational tools are needed to perform this genotyping and to find and analyze recombination events. We have developed a suite of programs, ReCombine, for using short sequence reads from next-generation sequencing experiments to genotype yeast meiotic progeny. Upon genotyping, the program CrossOver, a component of ReCombine, then detects recombination products and classifies them into categories based on the features found at each location and their distribution among the various chromatids. CrossOver is also capable of analyzing segregation data from microarray experiments or other sources. This package of programs is designed to allow even researchers without computational expertise to use high-throughput, whole-genome methods to study the molecular mechanisms of meiotic recombination

Pervasive and Essential Roles of the Top3-Rmi1 Decatenase Orchestrate Recombination and Facilitate Chromosome Segregation in Meiosis

The Bloom’s helicase ortholog, Sgs1, plays central roles to coordinate the formation and resolution of joint molecule intermediates (JMs) during meiotic recombination in budding yeast. Sgs1 can associate with type-I topoisomerase Top3 and its accessory factor Rmi1 to form a conserved complex best known for its unique ability to decatenate double-Holliday junctions. Contrary to expectations, we show that the strand-passage activity of Top3-Rmi1 is required for all known functions of Sgs1 in meiotic recombination, including channeling JMs into physiological crossover and noncrossover pathways, and suppression of non-allelic recombination. We infer that Sgs1 always functions in the context of the Sgs1-Top3-Rmi1 complex to regulate meiotic recombination. In addition, we reveal a distinct late role for Top3-Rmi1 in resolving recombination-dependent chromosome entanglements to allow segregation at anaphase. Surprisingly, Sgs1 does not share this essential role of Top3-Rmi1. These data reveal an essential and unexpectedly pervasive role for the Top3-Rmi1 decatenase during meiosis