Anticorpos anti-Neospora caninum em bovinos, ovinos e bubalinos no Estado do Rio Grande do Sul Antibodies to Neospora caninum in cattle, sheep and water buffalo in Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil

A infecção pelo Neospora caninum é distribuída mundialmente e tem sido considerada uma importante causa de abortos em bovinos, que são hospedeiros intermediários do protozoário. O presente artigo relata um estudo sorológico da infecção pelo N. caninum em 1.024 amostras de bovinos, ovinos e bubalinos, oriundos de 55 propriedades em 16 municípios do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (RS). Anticorpos contra o agente foram detectados por um teste imunoenzimático do tipo ELISA em 11,4% (89/781) das amostras de bovinos, em 14,6% (24/164) dos bubalinos e em 3,2% (2/62) dos ovinos. Bovinos soropositivos foram detectados em todos os municípios amostrados. Esses resultados demonstram que a infecção pelo N. caninum encontra-se amplamente difundida no rebanho bovino e também em outras espécies de ruminantes do Estado. Aliados a relatos clínicos e histopatológicos anteriores, esses resultados ressaltam a importância do N. caninum como agente etiológico de falhas reprodutivas em bovinos no RS.<br>The infection by Neospora caninum is distributed worldwide and has been considered an important cause of abortion in cattle, which are intermediate hosts of the parasite. The present article reports an serological survey of the N.caninum infection in 1024 serum samples of cattle, sheep and water buffalo from 55 herds in 16 counties of the state of Rio Grande do Sul (RS). Antibodies to the agent were detected by ELISA in 11.4% (89/781) bovine samples, in 14.6% (24/164) water buffalo and in 3.2% (2/62) sheep sera. Positive cattle were detected in all tested counties. These results demonstrate that N. caninum infection is widespread among bovine and other ruminants in the state. Taken together with previous clinical and pathological reports, these results are indicative of the importance of the parasite as the etiological agent of reproductive failure in cattle in RS

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale. Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter; identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation; analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution; describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity; and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes