Use of SMS texts for facilitating access to online alcohol interventions: a feasibility study

A41 Use of SMS texts for facilitating access to online alcohol interventions: a feasibility study In: Addiction Science & Clinical Practice 2017, 12(Suppl 1): A4

Lignocellulose degradation by rumen bacterial communities: New insights from metagenome analyses

Ruminant animals house a dense and diverse community of microorganisms in their rumen, an enlarged compartment in their stomach, which provides a supportive environment for the storage and microbial fermentation of ingested feeds dominated by plant materials. The rumen microbiota has acquired diverse and functionally overlapped enzymes for the degradation of plant cell wall polysaccharides. In rumen Bacteroidetes, enzymes involved in degradation are clustered into polysaccharide utilization loci to facilitate coordinated expression when target polysaccharides are available. Firmicutes use free enzymes and cellulosomes to degrade the polysaccharides. Fibrobacters either aggregate lignocellulose-degrading enzymes on their cell surface or release them into the extracellular medium in membrane vesicles, a mechanism that has proven extremely effective in the breakdown of recalcitrant cellulose. Based on current metagenomic analyses, rumen Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes are categorized as generalist microbes that can degrade a wide range of polysaccharides, while other members adapted toward specific polysaccharides. Particularly, there is ample evidence that Verrucomicrobia and Spirochaetes have evolved enzyme systems for the breakdown of complex polysaccharides such as xyloglucans, peptidoglycans, and pectin. It is concluded that diversity in degradation mechanisms is required to ensure that every component in feeds is efficiently degraded, which is key to harvesting maximum energy by host animals

Whole genome re-sequencing reveals adaptation prior to the divergence of buffalo subspecies

The application of high-throughput genotyping or sequencing data helps us to understand the genomic response to natural and artificial selection. In this study, we scanned the genomes of five indigenous buffalo populations belong to three recognized breeds, adapted to different geographical and agro-ecological zones in Iran, to unravel the extent of genomic diversity and to localize genomic regions and genes underwent past selection. A total of 46 river buffalo whole genomes, from West and East Azerbaijan, Gilan, Mazandaran, and Khuzestan provinces, were resequenced. Our sequencing data reached to a coverage above 99% of the river buffalo reference genome and an average read depth around 9.2× per sample. We identified 20.55 million SNPs, including 63,097 missense, 707 stop-gain, and 159 stop-loss mutations that might have functional consequences. Genomic diversity analyses showed modest structuring among Iranian buffalo populations following frequent gene flow or admixture in the recent past. Evidence of positive selection was investigated using both differentiation (Fst) and fixation (Pi) metrics. Analysis of fixation revealed three genomic regions in all three breeds with aberrant polymorphism contents on BBU2, 20, and 21. Fixation signal on BBU2 overlapped with the OCA2-HERC2 genes, suggestive of adaptation to UV exposure through pigmentation mechanism. Further validation using resequencing data from other five bovine species as well as the Axiom Buffalo Genotyping Array 90K data of river and swamp buffaloes indicated that these fixation signals persisted across river and swamp buffaloes and extended to taurine cattle, implying an ancient evolutionary event occurred before the speciation of buffalo and taurine cattle. These results contributed to our understanding of major genetic switches that took place during the evolution of modern buffaloes

Point pattern analysis of regional city distributions

Point processes, Complete spatial randomness, Maximum pseudo-likelihood estimation, MCMC maximum likelihood estimation,