In Europe, Puumala virus (PUUV) is responsible for nephropathia epidemica (NE), a mild form of haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFSR). Despite the presence of its reservoir, the bank vole, on most of French territory, the geographic distribution of NE cases is heterogeneous and NE endemic and non-endemic areas have been reported. In this study we analyzed whether bank vole-PUUV interactions could partly shape these epidemiological differences. We performed crossed-experimental infections using...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
Negative interaction between alleles that arise independently in diverging populations (i.e., Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities) can cause reduction of fitness in their hybrids. However, heterosis in hybrids can emerge if hybridization breaks down detrimental epistatic interaction within parental lineages. In this study, we examined the life-history fitness of the inter-specific F1 hybrids of two recently diverged microcrustacean species Daphnia pulex and D. pulicaria as well as intra-specific...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
Exchanging genetic material with another individual seems risky from an evolutionary standpoint, and yet living things across all scales and phyla do so quite regularly. The pervasiveness of such genetic exchange, or recombination, in nature has defied explanation since the time of Darwin. Conditions that favor recombination, however, are well-understood: recombination is advantageous when the genomes of individuals in a population contain more selectively mismatched combinations of alleles than...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
In bacterial cells, protein expression is a highly stochastic process. At the same time, physiological variables such as the cellular growth rate also fluctuate significantly. A common intuition is that, due to their relatively high noise amplitudes, proteins with a low mean expression level are the most important causes of these fluctuations on a larger, physiological scale. Noise in highly expressed proteins, whose stochastic fluctuations are relatively small, is often ignored. In this work, we...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
Color polymorphism - two or more heritable color phenotypes maintained within a single breeding population - is an extreme type of intra-specific diversity widespread across the tree of life but rarely studied in a comparative framework. Color polymorphism is thought to be an engine for speciation, where morph loss or divergence between distinct color morphs within a species results in the rapid evolution of new lineages, and thus, color polymorphic lineages are expected to display elevated diversification...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
Chance, contingency, and necessity in the experimental evolution of ancestral proteins [NEW RESULTS]
The extent to which evolutionary outcomes reflect the unpredictable influences of chance and contingency is a central but unanswered question in evolutionary biology. A precise characterization requires evolutionary trajectories to be repeated multiple times under identical environmental conditions from multiple starting points across history, a scenario that rarely, if ever, occurs in nature. Here we combine continuous experimental evolution with ancestral protein reconstruction and manipulative...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
How ecological divergence causes strong reproductive isolation between populations in close geographic contact remains poorly understood at the genomic level. We here study this question in a stickleback population pair adapted to contiguous, ecologically different lake and stream habitats. Dense clinal whole-genome sequence data reveal numerous regions fixed for alternative alleles over a distance of just a few hundred meters. This strong polygenic adaptive divergence must constitute a genome-wide...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
Vivid, saturated structural colors are a conspicuous and important aspect of the appearance of many organisms. A huge diversity of underlying 3D ordered biophotonic nanostructures has been documented, for instance, within the chitinaceous exoskeletons of insects. Here, we report diverse, highly ordered, intracellular, 3D biophotonic crystals in vivid plumages from three families of birds, which have each evolved independently from quasi-ordered (glassy) ancestral states. These morphologies include...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
Genes with identical DNA sequences may show differential expression because of epigenetic marks. These marks in pathogens are key to their virulence and are being evaluated as targets for medical treatment. Where epigenetic marks were created in response to past conditions (epigenetically inherited), they represent a form of memory, the impact of which has not been considered in the evolution of infectious diseases. We fill this gap by exploring the evolution of virulence in pathogens that inherit...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
Previous work found that the centromeric repeats of the Western European house mouse (Mus musculus domesticus) are composed predominantly of a 120 bp monomer that is shared by the X and autosomes. Polymorphism in length and sequence was also reported. Here I quantified the length and sequence polymorphism of the centromeric repeats found on the X and autosomes. The levels of local and global sequence variation were also compared. I found three length variants: a 64mer, 112mer and 120mer with relative...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
Cardiac glycosides are known to fatally inhibit the Na,K-ATPase throughout the animal kingdom. Several animals, however, evolved target-site insensitivity by substitution in the otherwise highly conserved cardiac glycoside binding pocket located on the Na,K-ATPase -subunit. The minimal functional enzyme consists of an - and a {beta}-subunit, considered mainly as a chaperone responsible for correct folding and membrane integration. We here analyze resistance to cardiac glycosides and kinetic properties...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
The phenomenon of X chromosome inactivation (XCI) mediated by sex-specific differences in DNA methylation is well characterized in eutherian mammals. Although XCI is shared between eutherians and marsupials, the role of marsupial DNA methylation in this process remains contested. Here we examine genome-wide signatures of DNA methylation from methylation maps across fives tissues from a male and female koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) and present the first whole genome, multi-tissue marsupial "methylome...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
During the first months of SARS-CoV-2 evolution in a new host, contrasting hypotheses have been proposed about the way the virus has evolved and diversified worldwide. The aim of this study was to perform a comprehensive evolutionary analysis to describe the human outbreak and the evolutionary rate of different genomic regions of SARS-CoV-2. The molecular evolution in nine genomic regions of SARS-CoV-2 was analyzed using three different approaches: phylogenetic signal assessment, emergence of amino...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
How gene function evolves is a central question of evolutionary biology. It can be investigated by comparing functional genomics results between species and between genes. Most comparative studies of functional genomics have used pairwise comparisons. Yet it has been shown that this can provide biased results, since genes, like species, are phylogenetically related. Phylogenetic comparative methods should allow to correct for this, but they depend on strong assumptions, including unbiased tree estimates...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
Recombination has been shown to contribute to HIV-1 evolution in vivo, but the underlying dynamics are extremely complex, depending on the nature of the fitness landscapes and of epistatic interactions. A less well-studied determinant of recombinant evolution is the mode of virus transmission in the cell population. HIV-1 can spread by free virus transmission, resulting largely in singly infected cells, and also by direct cell-to-cell transmission, resulting in the simultaneous infection of cells...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
While non-coding G-quadruplexes (G4s) act as conserved regulatory elements when located in gene promoter and splice sites, the G4 evolutionary conservation in protein coding regions have been low explored. To address the evolutionary dynamics acting on coding G4, we mapped and characterized potential G4-forming sequences across twenty-four primates gene orthologous. We found that potentially more stable G4 motifs exist in coding regions following a species-specific trend. Moreover, these motifs depicted...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 03:00
Understanding the relationship between genetic structure and geography provides information about a species' evolutionary history and can be useful to breeders interested in de novo domestication. The North American prairie is especially interesting because of its relatively recent origin and subsequent dramatic fragmentation and degradation. Silphium integrifolium is an iconic perennial American prairie wildflower targeted for domestication as an oilseed crop. Germplasm in the existing breeding...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 03:00
BACKGROUNDGene mutations endowing herbicide resistance may have negative pleiotropic effects on plant fitness. Quantifying these effects is critical for predicting the evolution of herbicide resistance and developing management strategies for herbicide-resistant weeds. This study reports the effects of the acetohydroxyacid synthase (AHAS) Trp574Leu mutation throughout the life cycle of the weed feral radish (Raphanus sativus L.). RESULTSResistant and susceptible biotypes responded differently...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
If there is abundant mutational and standing genetic variation, most expect that the rate of evolution would be driven primarily by natural selection, and potentially be independent of current variability or variation. Contrary to this expectation, we (H17: Houle et al. 2017 Nature 548:447) found surprisingly strong scaling relationships with slopes near one between mutational variance, standing genetic variance and macro-evolutionary rate in Drosophilid wing traits. Jiang and Zhang (J&Z20: 2020...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 03:00
With the recent classification of red panda into two phylogenetic species, we propose Siang river as a potential boundary for species divergence between the Himalayan red panda (Ailurus fulgens) and the Chinese red panda (Ailurus styani). Bayesian based phylogeny and MJ network splited all the sequences into two distinct clusters in accordance to the origin of the samples collected from the east and west side of the Siang river. The clade 1, that represented Himalayan red panda, was formed by inclusion...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
Asexually reproducing populations of single cells evolve through mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift to enhance their reproductive fitness. The environment provides the contexts that allow and regulate their fitness dynamics. In this work, we used Avida - a digital evolution framework - to uncover the effect of mutation rates, maximum size of the population, and the relative abundance of resources, on evolutionary outcomes in asexually reproducing populations of digital organisms. We observed...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 03:00
Pleiotropic fitness tradeoffs and their opposite, buttressing pleiotropy, underlie many important phenomena in ecology and evolution. Yet, predicting whether a population adapting to one ("home") environment will concomitantly gain or lose fitness in another ("non-home") environment remains challenging, especially when adaptive mutations have diverse pleiotropic effects. Here, we address this problem using the concept of the joint distribution of fitness effects (JDFE), a local measurable property...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 03:00
The cercozoan amoeba Paulinella chromatophora contains photosynthetic organelles - termed chromatophores - that evolved from a cyanobacterium, independently from plastids in plants and algae. Despite the more recent origin of the chromatophore, it shows tight integration into the host cell. It imports hundreds of nucleus-encoded proteins, and diverse metabolites are exchanged across the two chromatophore envelope membranes. However, the limited set of chromatophore-encoded transporters appears insufficient...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is central to prokaryotic evolution. However, little is known about the "scale" of individual HGT events. In this work, we introduce the first computational framework to help answer the following fundamental question: How often does more than one gene get horizontally transferred in a single HGT event? Our method, called HoMer, uses phylogenetic reconciliation to infer single-gene HGT events across a given set of species/strains, employs several techniques to account...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
Understanding brain activity in response to unilateral vocal fold paralysis is essential to determine the neural compensatory mechanism underlying adaptation to voice disorders and to develop novel and improved rehabilitation programs for these disorders. We aimed to clarify brain activity during phonation (prolonged vowel, |i:|) in patients with chronic left vocal fold paralysis (LVFP) and compare with that in normal controls.
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
Laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR) is an extra-oesophageal variant of gastro-oesophgeal reflux disease. Patients often do not present with the classic reflux symptoms of heartburn or regurgitation. Accurate diagnosis of LPR can be challenging. The reflux finding score (RFS) is system based on the assessment of eight parameters seen on fibre optic laryngoscopy, used to determine the presence and the severity of laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR). Scoring the RFS is subjective and highly dependent on the examiner's...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 03:00
Tessitura—the habitual pitch range of a musical piece or role—is widely accepted as a significant factor in determining whether a singer should perform a given piece or role. However, attempts to quantify tessitura have historically relied on laborious hand calculations. The current study introduces a novel MATLAB program (“Tessa”) that automates tessitura analysis of digital sheet music in the MusicXML format. This program will allow voice teachers and singing voice specialists to assess the appropriateness...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
Deep learning using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is widely used in medical imaging research. This study was performed to investigate if vocal fold normality in laryngoscopic images can be determined by CNN-based deep learning and to compare accuracy of CNN models and explore the feasibility of application of deep learning on laryngoscopy.
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
Patient recollection of their trial vocal fold injection outcomes is crucial in determining future treatment. This study aims to assess a new clinical tool, the UCSF Laryngeal Symptom Diary, for its ease of use, clinical value in patient symptom tracking, and utility for long-term decision-making following trial vocal fold injection.
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
The aim of this study was to review systematically the literature and to investigate the effects of electrical stimulation in treating dysphonia.
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
To evaluate the Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) and its isolated acoustic measures accuracy in discriminating voices with different degrees of deviation.
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
The goal of this study was to determine the prevalence of esophageal disorders among voice patients with intractable laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR) who have undergone 24 pH impedance and esophageal manometry.
Sat Aug 29, 2020 03:00
To examine flow phonation characteristics with regard to vocal fold vibration and voice source properties in vocally healthy adults using multimodality voice measurements across various phonation types (breathy, neutral, flow, and pressed) and loudness conditions (typical, loud, and soft).
Fri Aug 28, 2020 03:00
Marijuana is derived from the cannabis sativa plant originating in central and southeast Asia. In recent years, there was increasing popularity and use of marijuana in addition to the legalization of its recreational use in eleven states. However, the effect of marijuana on the voice is still unclear. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine the perceived impacts marijuana has on voice by surveying patients from a voice center. The inquiry included smoking, vaping, edible marijuana,...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 03:00
Fri Aug 28, 2020 21:28
Surgical outcomes of laparoscopic total mesorectal excision combined with en‐bloc seminal vesicle and prostate resection for locally advanced rectal cancer after chemoradiotherapy. Abstract Background This study aimed to explore the surgical outcomes of laparoscopic total mesorectal excision (TME) combined with en‐bloc seminal vesicle resection (SVR) and partial prostate resection (PPR) for locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC) after chemoradiotherapy (CRT). Methods Patients receiving...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 15:24
(a) Computed tomography scans for patients with a non‐surgical diagnosis. (b) Patients with a non‐surgical diagnosis discharged <12 h. Abstract Background Acute abdominal pain is a common surgical presentation. We previously found that over the last decade, more patients were admitted to hospital with non‐surgical diagnoses (e.g. gastroenteritis, constipation and non‐specific abdominal pain) and length of stay and use of imaging (mainly computed tomography scan) for these patients...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 15:24
In this manuscript, we show that there is a rising incidence in colorectal cancer in younger patients, defined as those aged less than 50 years old. There is also the trend towards advanced disease at diagnosis and left sided tumours, leading to poorer prognosis. Our manuscript highlights the need to increase education and awareness in the younger population regarding the signs and symptoms of colorectal cancer. Abstract Background The incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) in younger...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 15:24
Routine performance of random colonic biopsies should be questioned. These should be performed in selected patients only with a high degree of suspicion of an organic cause of their chronic non‐bloody watery diarrhoea as they otherwise have low yield and are of significant cost. All random colonic biopsies should be placed in one specimen pot when submitted for histopathology analysis as a cost saving measure. Abstract Background Recent guidelines from the British Society of Gastroenterology...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 15:24
High neutrophil‐to‐lymphocyte ratio (NLR)/platelet‐to‐lymphocyte ratio (PLR) is associated with complicated diverticulitis. High NLR/PLR is associated with higher rate of recurrence of acute diverticulitis. High NLR/PLR is associated with longer length of stay when adding all of the hospitalizations for acute diverticulitis. Abstract Background The neutrophil‐to‐lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and platelet‐to‐lymphocyte ratio (PLR) have emerged as markers of various outcomes of inflammatory and...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 15:24
Publication date: Available online 30 August 2020Source: Sleep MedicineAuthor(s): Valérie Cochen De Cock, Sandy Lacombe, France Woimant, Aurélia Poujois
Sun Aug 30, 2020 20:17
Contrasting painless and painful phenotypes of pediatric restless legs syndrome: a twin family study
Publication date: Available online 29 August 2020Source: Sleep MedicineAuthor(s): David Champion, Minh Bui, Phillip Aouad, Sara Sarraf, Theresa Donnelly, Aneeka Bott, Cindy Chapman, Shuxiang Goh, Georgia Ng, Tiina Jaaniste, John Hopper
Sat Aug 29, 2020 13:51
Publication date: Available online 28 August 2020Source: Sleep MedicineAuthor(s): Sonja G. Schütz, Lynda D. Lisabeth, Chia-Wei Hsu, Sehee Kim, Ronald D. Chervin, Devin L. Brown
Fri Aug 28, 2020 19:42
Publication date: Available online 28 August 2020Source: Sleep MedicineAuthor(s): Bradley E. Aouizerat, Eeeseung Byun, Clive R. Pullinger, Caryl Gay, Anners Lerdal, Kathryn A. Lee
Fri Aug 28, 2020 19:42
Publication date: Available online 28 August 2020Source: Sleep MedicineAuthor(s): Liang Gong, Ronghua Xu, Minhuang Qin, Duan Liu, Bei Zhang, Youcai Bi, Chunhua Xi
Fri Aug 28, 2020 19:42
Publication date: Available online 28 August 2020Source: Sleep MedicineAuthor(s): Lin Mei, Xiaodan Li, Guifei Zhou, Tingting Ji, Jun Chen, Zhifei Xu, Yun Peng, Yue Liu, Hongbin Li, Jie Zhang, Shengcai Wang, Yamei Zhang, Wentong Ge, Yongli Guo, Yue Qiu, Xinbei Jia, Jinghong Tian, Li Zheng, Jiangang Liu, Jun Tai
Fri Aug 28, 2020 19:42
Objective. Neural crest stem cells (NCSCs) are prototypically migratory cells immigrating from the dorsal neural tube to specific embryonic sites where they generate a variety of cell types. A lot of biomarkers for NCSCs have been identified. However, which biomarkers are the most specific is still unclear. Methods. The rat embryos harvested in embryonic day 9 (E9), E9.5, E10, E10.5, E11, E12, E13, and E14 were paraffin-embedded and sectioned in transverse. NCSCs were spatiotemporally demonstrated...
Sun Aug 30, 2020 17:35
Objective. Since early diagnosis is very important for treating gastric cancer (GC), we aimed to detect serum small proline-rich protein2A (SPRR2A) to verify its diagnostic value for GC patients. Methods. Serum samples were collected from 200 patients with GC, 100 patients with gastritis, 40 patients with rectal cancer (RC), 50 patients with colon cancer (CC), and 100 healthy controls. An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) detection kit was applied to measure serum SPRR2A concentration. The...
Sat Aug 29, 2020 04:50
The gut microbiota has been presumed to have a role in the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes (T1D). Significant changes in the microbial composition of T1D patients have been reported in several case-control studies. This study is aimed at systematically reviewing the existing literature, which has investigated the alterations of the intestinal microbiome in T1D patients compared with healthy controls (HCs) using 16S ribosomal RNA-targeted sequencing. The databases of MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Science,...
Fri Aug 28, 2020 04:20
Publication date: Available online 29 August 2020Source: Behavioural Brain ResearchAuthor(s): Allison R. Foilb, Gabriella N. Sansaricq, Emily E. Zona, Kayla Fernando, John P. Christianson
Sun Aug 30, 2020 17:21
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