A deep insight into the sialome of male and female aedes aegypti mosquitoes

Only adult female mosquitoes feed on blood, while both genders take sugar meals. Accordingly, several compounds associated with blood feeding (i.e. vasodilators, anti-clotting, anti-platelets) are found only in female glands, while enzymes associated with sugar feeding or antimicrobials (such as lysozyme) are found in the glands of both sexes. We performed de novo assembly of reads from adult Aedes aegypti female and male salivary gland libraries (285 and 90 million reads, respectively). By mapping back the reads to the assembled contigs, plus mapping the reads from a publicly available Ae. aegypti library from adult whole bodies, we identified 360 transcripts (including splice variants and alleles) overexpressed tenfold or more in the glands when compared to whole bodies. Moreover, among these, 207 were overexpressed fivefold or more in female vs. male salivary glands, 85 were near equally expressed and 68 were overexpressed in male glands. We call in particular the attention to C-type lectins, angiopoietins, female-specific Antigen 5, the 9.7 kDa, 12–14 kDa, 23.5 kDa, 62/34 kDa, 4.2 kDa, proline-rich peptide, SG8, 8.7 kDa family and SGS fragments: these polypeptides are all of unknown function, but due to their overexpression in female salivary glands and putative secretory nature they are expected to affect host physiology. We have also found many transposons (some of which novel) and several endogenous viral transcripts (probably acquired by horizontal transfer) which are overexpressed in the salivary glands and may play some role in tissue-specific gene regulation or represent a mechanism of virus interference. This work contributes to a near definitive catalog of male and female salivary gland transcripts from Ae. aegypti, which will help to direct further studies aiming at the functional characterization of the many transcripts with unknown function and the understanding of their role in vector-host interaction and pathogen transmission

The Relationship Between Cognitive And Linguistic Abilities In Bilingual Children

We examined the relationship between cognitive and linguistic abilities in bilingual children (English – Spanish). In particular, we measured the effect of attentional control (the ability to maintain an operative goal, and goal-relevant information, in the face of distraction) and educational experience (amount of time reading) on reading ability (the ability to recognize words and discard misspelled non-words). The sample included 82 developing bilingual children from an immersion school in the United States. Participants were presented with two tasks: the Flanker task as the measure of attentional control (resistance to distractor interference) and the Lexical decision task as the measure of reading ability (processing words and discarding pseudohomophones). Performance in the Flanker task predicted performance in the lexical decision task. However, the amount of time practice reading (measured with a self-report questionnaire) did not predict performance in the lexical decision task. Lastly, performance in Spanish predicted performance in English. These findings point to a close connection between cognitive function and reading ability. Furthermore, the results support the linguistic interdependence hypothesis, as literacy skills are transferred across the two languages of developing bilingual children

Pronunciation development and instruction in distance language learning

The goal of this study was to explore how distance language learners’ pronunciation skills develop with and without targeted pronunciation training during their first semester of university language instruction. To this end, a new computer-assisted method of pronunciation instruction was designed, and its effectiveness, as well as learners’ experiences with the method, were assessed. The study was conducted over the course of one semester with 67 distance learners of German. Perception and oral production skills on the word and sentence level were assessed at the beginning and end of the semester for a treatment group that received targeted pronunciation instruction and a control group that did not receive pronunciation instruction, but otherwise followed the same curriculum. The results of the study showed that distance learners’ pronunciation skills did not improve significantly over the course of the semester in the absence of targeted pronunciation training. Results further indicated that learners who received targeted pronunciation training improved significantly from pre- to posttest and significantly outperformed learners in the control group on measures of perception and production accuracy at the end of the semester. These findings suggest that distance language instruction can benefit from including targeted pronunciation training