Love is in the air: Sociality and pair bondedness influence sifaka reproductive signalling

© 2013 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.Social complexity, often estimated by group size, is seen as driving the complexity of vocal signals, but its relation to olfactory signals, which arguably arose to function in nonsocial realms, remains underappreciated. That olfactory signals also may mediate within-group interaction, vary with social complexity and promote social cohesion underscores a potentially crucial link with sociality. To examine that link, we integrated chemical and behavioural analyses to ask whether olfactory signals facilitate reproductive coordination in a strepsirrhine primate, the Coquerel's sifaka, Propithecus coquereli. Belonging to a clade comprising primarily solitary, nocturnal species, the diurnal, group-living sifaka represents an interesting test case. Convergent with diurnal, group-living lemurids, sifakas expressed chemically rich scent signals, consistent with the social complexity hypothesis for communication. These signals minimally encoded the sex of the signaller and varied with female reproductive state. Likewise, sex and female fertility were reflected in within-group scent investigation, scent marking and overmarking. We further asked whether, within breeding pairs, the stability or quality of the pair's bond influences the composition of glandular signals and patterns of investigatory or scent-marking behaviour. Indeed, reproductively successful pairs tended to show greater similarity in their scent signals than did reproductively unsuccessful pairs, potentially through chemical convergence. Moreover, scent marking was temporally coordinated within breeding pairs and was influenced by past reproductive success. That olfactory signalling reflects social bondedness or reproductive history lends support to recent suggestions that the quality of relationships may be a more valuable proxy than group size for estimating social complexity. We suggest that olfactory signalling in sifakas is more complex than previously recognized and, as in other socially integrated species, can be a crucial mechanism for promoting group cohesion and maintaining social bonds. Thus, the evolution of sociality may well be reflected in the complexity of olfactory signalling.

Displacement of particles in microfluidics by laser-generated tandem bubbles.

The dynamic interaction between laser-generated tandem bubble and individual polystyrene particles of 2 and 10 μm in diameter is studied in a microfluidic channel (25 μm height) by high-speed imaging and particle image velocimetry. The asymmetric collapse of the tandem bubble produces a pair of microjets and associated long-lasting vortices that can propel a single particle to a maximum velocity of 1.4 m∕s in 30 μs after the bubble collapse with a resultant directional displacement up to 60 μm in 150 μs. This method may be useful for high-throughput cell sorting in microfluidic devices.

Determinants of protection among HIV‐exposed seronegative persons: an overview.

Both clinical experience and a growing medical literature indicate that some persons who have been exposed to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection remain uninfected. Although in some instances this may represent good fortune, cohorts of uninfected persons have been reported who are considered at high risk for infection. In these cohorts a variety of characteristics have been proposed as mediating protection, but to date only the 32–base pair deletion in the chemokine (C‐C motif) receptor 5 gene, which results in complete failure of cell surface expression of this coreceptor, has been associated with high‐level protection from HIV infection. With this in mind, there are probably many other factors that may individually or in combination provide some level of protection from acquisition of HIV infection. Because some of these factors are probably incompletely protective or inconsistently active, identifying them with confidence will be difficult. Nonetheless, clarifying the determinants of protection against HIV infection is a high priority that will require careful selection of high‐risk uninfected cohorts, who should undergo targeted studies of plausible mediators and broad screening for unexpected determinants of protection.

Modeling the evolution of regulatory elements by simultaneous detection and alignment with phylogenetic pair HMMs.

The computational detection of regulatory elements in DNA is a difficult but important problem impacting our progress in understanding the complex nature of eukaryotic gene regulation. Attempts to utilize cross-species conservation for this task have been hampered both by evolutionary changes of functional sites and poor performance of general-purpose alignment programs when applied to non-coding sequence. We describe a new and flexible framework for modeling binding site evolution in multiple related genomes, based on phylogenetic pair hidden Markov models which explicitly model the gain and loss of binding sites along a phylogeny. We demonstrate the value of this framework for both the alignment of regulatory regions and the inference of precise binding-site locations within those regions. As the underlying formalism is a stochastic, generative model, it can also be used to simulate the evolution of regulatory elements. Our implementation is scalable in terms of numbers of species and sequence lengths and can produce alignments and binding-site predictions with accuracy rivaling or exceeding current systems that specialize in only alignment or only binding-site prediction. We demonstrate the validity and power of various model components on extensive simulations of realistic sequence data and apply a specific model to study Drosophila enhancers in as many as ten related genomes and in the presence of gain and loss of binding sites. Different models and modeling assumptions can be easily specified, thus providing an invaluable tool for the exploration of biological hypotheses that can drive improvements in our understanding of the mechanisms and evolution of gene regulation.

Evolution of the sex-related locus and genomic features shared in microsporidia and fungi.

BACKGROUND: Microsporidia are obligate intracellular, eukaryotic pathogens that infect a wide range of animals from nematodes to humans, and in some cases, protists. The preponderance of evidence as to the origin of the microsporidia reveals a close relationship with the fungi, either within the kingdom or as a sister group to it. Recent phylogenetic studies and gene order analysis suggest that microsporidia share a particularly close evolutionary relationship with the zygomycetes. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here we expanded this analysis and also examined a putative sex-locus for variability between microsporidian populations. Whole genome inspection reveals a unique syntenic gene pair (RPS9-RPL21) present in the vast majority of fungi and the microsporidians but not in other eukaryotic lineages. Two other unique gene fusions (glutamyl-prolyl tRNA synthetase and ubiquitin-ribosomal subunit S30) that are present in metazoans, choanoflagellates, and filasterean opisthokonts are unfused in the fungi and microsporidians. One locus previously found to be conserved in many microsporidian genomes is similar to the sex locus of zygomycetes in gene order and architecture. Both sex-related and sex loci harbor TPT, HMG, and RNA helicase genes forming a syntenic gene cluster. We sequenced and analyzed the sex-related locus in 11 different Encephalitozoon cuniculi isolates and the sibling species E. intestinalis (3 isolates) and E. hellem (1 isolate). There was no evidence for an idiomorphic sex-related locus in this Encephalitozoon species sample. According to sequence-based phylogenetic analyses, the TPT and RNA helicase genes flanking the HMG genes are paralogous rather than orthologous between zygomycetes and microsporidians. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: The unique genomic hallmarks between microsporidia and fungi are independent of sequence based phylogenetic comparisons and further contribute to define the borders of the fungal kingdom and support the classification of microsporidia as unusual derived fungi. And the sex/sex-related loci appear to have been subject to frequent gene conversion and translocations in microsporidia and zygomycetes.

Dominant Splice Site Mutations in PIK3R1 Cause Hyper IgM Syndrome, Lymphadenopathy and Short Stature.

The purpose of this research was to use next generation sequencing to identify mutations in patients with primary immunodeficiency diseases whose pathogenic gene mutations had not been identified. Remarkably, four unrelated patients were found by next generation sequencing to have the same heterozygous mutation in an essential donor splice site of PIK3R1 (NM_181523.2:c.1425 + 1G > A) found in three prior reports. All four had the Hyper IgM syndrome, lymphadenopathy and short stature, and one also had SHORT syndrome. They were investigated with in vitro immune studies, RT-PCR, and immunoblotting studies of the mutation's effect on mTOR pathway signaling. All patients had very low percentages of memory B cells and class-switched memory B cells and reduced numbers of naïve CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. RT-PCR confirmed the presence of both an abnormal 273 base-pair (bp) size and a normal 399 bp size band in the patient and only the normal band was present in the parents. Following anti-CD40 stimulation, patient's EBV-B cells displayed higher levels of S6 phosphorylation (mTOR complex 1 dependent event), Akt phosphorylation at serine 473 (mTOR complex 2 dependent event), and Akt phosphorylation at threonine 308 (PI3K/PDK1 dependent event) than controls, suggesting elevated mTOR signaling downstream of CD40. These observations suggest that amino acids 435-474 in PIK3R1 are important for its stability and also its ability to restrain PI3K activity. Deletion of Exon 11 leads to constitutive activation of PI3K signaling. This is the first report of this mutation and immunologic abnormalities in SHORT syndrome.