Homogeneity of the 16S rDNA sequence among geographically disparate isolates of Taylorella equigenitalis

BACKGROUND: At present, six accessible sequences of 16S rDNA from Taylorella equigenitalis (T. equigenitalis) are available, whose sequence differences occur at a few nucleotide positions. Thus it is important to determine these sequences from additional strains in other countries, if possible, in order to clarify any anomalies regarding 16S rDNA sequence heterogeneity. Here, we clone and sequence the approximate full-length 16S rDNA from additional strains of T. equigenitalis isolated in Japan, Australia and France and compare these sequences to the existing published sequences. RESULTS: Clarification of any anomalies regarding 16S rDNA sequence heterogeneity of T. equigenitalis was carried out. When cloning, sequencing and comparison of the approximate full-length 16S rDNA from 17 strains of T. equigenitalis isolated in Japan, Australia and France, nucleotide sequence differences were demonstrated at the six loci in the 1,469 nucleotide sequence. Moreover, 12 polymorphic sites occurred among 23 sequences of the 16S rDNA, including the six reference sequences. CONCLUSION: High sequence similarity (99.5% or more) was observed throughout, except from nucleotide positions 138 to 501 where substitutions and deletions were noted

Neurons in the human amygdala encode face identity, but not gaze direction

The amygdala is important for face processing, and direction of eye gaze is one of the most socially salient facial signals. Recording from over 200 neurons in the amygdala of neurosurgical patients, we found robust encoding of the identity of neutral-expression faces, but not of their direction of gaze. Processing of gaze direction may rely on a predominantly cortical network rather than the amygdala

Combinatorial Modeling of Chromatin Features Quantitatively Predicts DNA Replication Timing in <i>Drosophila</i>

<div><p>In metazoans, each cell type follows a characteristic, spatio-temporally regulated DNA replication program. Histone modifications (HMs) and chromatin binding proteins (CBPs) are fundamental for a faithful progression and completion of this process. However, no individual HM is strictly indispensable for origin function, suggesting that HMs may act combinatorially in analogy to the histone code hypothesis for transcriptional regulation. In contrast to gene expression however, the relationship between combinations of chromatin features and DNA replication timing has not yet been demonstrated. Here, by exploiting a comprehensive data collection consisting of 95 CBPs and HMs we investigated their combinatorial potential for the prediction of DNA replication timing in <i>Drosophila</i> using quantitative statistical models. We found that while combinations of CBPs exhibit moderate predictive power for replication timing, pairwise interactions between HMs lead to accurate predictions genome-wide that can be locally further improved by CBPs. Independent feature importance and model analyses led us to derive a simplified, biologically interpretable model of the relationship between chromatin landscape and replication timing reaching 80% of the full model accuracy using six model terms. Finally, we show that pairwise combinations of HMs are able to predict differential DNA replication timing across different cell types. All in all, our work provides support to the existence of combinatorial HM patterns for DNA replication and reveal cell-type independent key elements thereof, whose experimental investigation might contribute to elucidate the regulatory mode of this fundamental cellular process.</p></div