Project description:Revisiting The Phylogeography, Demography and Taxonomy of The Frog Genus Ptychadena in The Ethiopian Highlands With The Use Of Genome-Wide SNP Data
Project description:Ethiopian cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) shows remarkably heterogeneous clinical presentations, but the underlying immunopathological mechanisms driving this heterogeneity in disease presentation remains poorly understood. To characterise the local immune response in Ethiopian CL, we performed spatial transcriptomics (Visium, 10x Genomics) on paired (lesional and non lesional) skin punch biopsies from five Ethiopian CL patients. We used reference-free deconvolution, morphology-guided regional analyses, and immunohistochemistry to identify five5 dominant patient-defined immunopathological responses: i) epithelial hyperplasia with interferon-stimulated keratinocytes, ii) cytotoxicity with tertiary lymphoid structures, iii) granulomatous inflammation with proinflammatory response iv) granulomatous inflammation with M2-polarised myeloid cell responses , and v) fibrotic remodelling with active collagen synthesis. Future longitudinal studies are needed to distinguish whether these patterns represent discrete pathotypes or stages of disease progression. Improved understanding of disease pathotypes in Ethiopian CL directly supports the WHO 2030 roadmap for leishmaniasis control and informs future immune-based therapeutic strategies.
Project description:Frogs are an ecologically diverse and phylogenetically ancient group of anuran amphibians that include important vertebrate cell and developmental model systems, notably the genus Xenopus. Here we report a high-quality reference genome sequence for the western clawed frog, Xenopus tropicalis, along with draft chromosome-scale sequences of three distantly related emerging model frog species, Eleutherodactylus coqui, Engystomops pustulosus and Hymenochirus boettgeri. Frog chromosomes have remained remarkably stable since the Mesozoic Era, with limited Robertsonian (i.e., centric) translocations and end-to-end fusions found among the smaller chromosomes. Conservation of synteny includes conservation of centromere locations, marked by centromeric tandem repeats associated with Cenp-a binding, surrounded by pericentromeric LINE/L1 elements. We explored chromosome structure across frogs, using a dense meiotic linkage map for X. tropicalis and chromatin conformation capture (Hi-C) data for all species. Abundant satellite repeats occupy the unusually long (~20 megabase) terminal regions of each chromosome that coincide with high rates of recombination. Both embryonic and differentiated cells show reproducible association of centromeric chromatin, and of telomeres, reflecting a Rabl-like configuration. Our comparative analyses reveal 13 conserved ancestral anuran chromosomes from which contemporary frog genomes were constructed.
2022-03-30 | GSE199671 | GEO
Project description:Evolutionary genomics of the frog subgenus Silurana (genus Xenopus)