Lithological and Palynological Analyses of a Quaternary Exposure, Waterman Creek, O\u27Brien County, Iowa

Erosion along Waterman Creek, O\u27Brien County, Iowa, has exposed two tills separated by a peat bed. The lower till is a pre-Illinoian till, based on lithological analyses, which crops out in the stream valleys and roadcuts along the Little Sioux River. It is also the same till which occurs at the surface west of Mill Creek in O\u27Brien County. Palynological analyses of the 38 cm thick peat bed indicate that a boreal forest containing abundant spruce and larch trees inhabited this area for a period of time before 40,000 RCYBP. This vegetation is similar to the late-glacial vegetation of northwestern Iowa, approximately 12,000 RCYBP

A Farmdalian Pollen Diagram From East-Central Iowa

Pollen analysis of the Butler Farm buried peat in east-central Iowa suggests that a spruce-pine forest grew in the area during the Farmdalian Substage. Pine decreased and spruce increased in dominance as the peat accumulated. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the peat was deposited from 28,800 to 22,750 RCYBP. It is overlain by late Wisconsinan loess and underlain by a Sangamon paleosol developed on Illinoian till. The regional pollen data suggest a general cooling trend through Farmdale time

A late-glacial pollen sequence from northeastern Iowa : Sumner Bog revisited

https://ir.uiowa.edu/igs_tis/1002/thumbnail.jp

CG dinucleotide clustering is a species-specific property of the genome

Cytosines at cytosine-guanine (CG) dinucleotides are the near-exclusive target of DNA methyltransferases in mammalian genomes. Spontaneous deamination of methylcytosine to thymine makes methylated cytosines unusually susceptible to mutation and consequent depletion. The loci where CG dinucleotides remain relatively enriched, presumably due to their unmethylated status during the germ cell cycle, have been referred to as CpG islands. Currently, CpG islands are solely defined by base compositional criteria, allowing annotation of any sequenced genome. Using a novel bioinformatic approach, we show that CG clusters can be identified as an inherent property of genomic sequence without imposing a base compositional a priori assumption. We also show that the CG clusters co-localize in the human genome with hypomethylated loci and annotated transcription start sites to a greater extent than annotations produced by prior CpG island definitions. Moreover, this new approach allows CG clusters to be identified in a species-specific manner, revealing a degree of orthologous conservation that is not revealed by current base compositional approaches. Finally, our approach is able to identify methylating genomes (such as Takifugu rubripes) that lack CG clustering entirely, in which it is inappropriate to annotate CpG islands or CG clusters

The nature and identification of quantitative trait loci: a community’s view

This white paper by eighty members of the Complex Trait Consortium presents a community’s view on the approaches and statistical analyses that are needed for the identification of genetic loci that determine quantitative traits. Quantitative trait loci (QTLs) can be identified in several ways, but is there a definitive test of whether a candidate locus actually corresponds to a specific QTL?