Project description:In feather-footed pigeons, mutant alleles of PITX1 and TBX5 drive the partial redeployment of an evolutionarily conserved forelimb genetic program in the hindlimb.
Project description:The black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes) is a star example of the efforts of conservation programs in bringing endangered species back from the brink of extinction. As one of the world’s most endangered mammals, the vast majority of black-footed ferrets living in the wild today are the offspring of a founding captive population. The success of this ongoing breeding program, however, is threatened by inbreeding depression and the observed decline in pregnancy rates since its founding. As the wild and modern captive populations share a genetic history, the greatest difference between the two groups is the captive environment of the breeding program. In this study, we used RNA sequencing and proteomics for the first time in black-footed ferrets to explore whether the diet of wild ferrets versus captive diet variants could explain the differences in fertility and sperm characteristics observed between each population. We find that changes in both the transcriptional and proteomic profile of black-footed ferret ejaculate are strongly associated with differences in fertility, especially in pathways associated with innate immunity and metabolism; that transcriptional changes are further exacerbated by diet. Overall, our results support the hypothesis of ongoing environmental-dependent inbreeding depression in the black-footed ferret, with a need to re-evaluate dietary and environmental parameters of the conservation program; and also illustrates the value of multi-level genomics for conservation management programs.
Project description:Lifespan varies both within and across species, but the general principles of its control are not understood. To identify transcriptomic signatures of mammalian longevity, we sequenced multiple organs of young adult mammals corresponding to 8 different species, including Canadian beaver, long-tailed macaque, greater tube-nosed bat, baboon, white-footed mouse, sugar glider, Siberian chipmunk and American black bear. We aggregated this dataset with publicly available pan-mammalian data and performed multi-tissue gene expression analyses across 41 mammalian species. This allowed us to identifiy signatures of species longevity and assess their relationship with biomarkers of aging and lifespan-extending interventions. This dataset complements RNAseq profiles of tissues from 23 mammalian species stored at GSE43013.
Project description:Malaria morbidity and mortality caused by both Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax extend well beyond the African continent, and, although P. vivax causes 80-300 million severe cases each year, vivax transmission remains poorly understood. Plasmodium parasites are transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes, and the critical site of interaction between parasite and host is at the mosquito's luminal midgut brush border. While the genome of the "model" African P. falciparum vector, Anopheles gambiae, has been sequenced, evolutionary divergence limits its utility as a reference across anophelines, especially non-sequenced P. vivax vectors such as Anopheles albimanus. Clearly, enabling technologies and platforms that bridge this substantial scientific gap are required in order to provide public health scientists key transcriptomic and proteomic information that could spur the development of novel interventions to combat this disease. To our knowledge, no approaches have been published which address this issue. To bolster our understanding of P. vivax-An. albimanus midgut interactions, we developed an integrated bioinformatic-hybrid RNA-Seq-LC-MS/MS approach involving An. albimanus transcriptome (15,764 contigs) and luminal midgut subproteome (9,445 proteins) assembly, which, when used with our custom Diptera protein database (685,078 sequences), facilitated a comparative proteomic analysis of the midgut brush borders of two important malaria vectors, An. gambiae and An. albimanus. Summary from: http://www.mcponline.org/content/early/2012/10/17/mcp.M112.019596.long The An. albimanus transcriptome dataset is available at http://funcgen.vectorbase.org/RNAseq/Anopheles_albimanus/INSP/v2