Search results for "Common"

Transmission of mutualistic bacteria in social and gregarious insects

2018

Symbiotic microbes can confer a range of benefits to social, sub-social, and gregarious insects that include contributions to nutrition, digestion, and defense. Transmission of beneficial symbionts to the next generation in these insects sometimes occurs transovarially as in many solitary insects, but primarily through social contact such as coprophagy in gregarious taxa, and trophallaxis in eusocial insects. While these behaviors benefit reliable transmission of multi-microbial assemblages, they may also come at the cost of inviting the spread of parasites and pathogens. Nonetheless, the overall benefit of social symbiont transmission may be one of several important factors that reinforce …

Timing of complementary feeding and associations with maternal and infant characteristics: A Norwegian cross-sectional study.

2018

Norwegian Health authorities recommend solid food to be introduced between child age 4-6 months, depending on both the mother´s and infant's needs. The aim of this paper is to describe timing of complementary feeding in a current sample of Norwegian mother/infant-dyads and explore potential associations between timing of introduction to solid foods and a wide range of maternal and infant characteristics known from previous literature to influence early feeding interactions. The paper is based on data from the Norwegian randomized controlled trial Early Food for Future Health. In 2016, a total of 715 mothers completed a web-based questionnaire at child age 5.5 months. We found that 5% of the…

Social regulation of insulin signaling and the evolution of eusociality in ants

2018

The benefits of being well fed In eusocial insects, the vast majority of individuals sacrifice their reproductive potential to support the reproductive queen. Although this system has evolved repeatedly, there is still much debate surrounding its origin. Working with seven different species of ants, Chandra et al. used a transcriptomic approach to show that a single gene is consistently up-regulated in queens. This gene seems to confer reproductive status through integration with increased nutrition. In a clonal ant, larval signals disrupt this gene up-regulation, destabilizing the division of reproductive labor. Increasing levels of the associated peptide override these larval signals and …

FASTdoop: A versatile and efficient library for the input of FASTA and FASTQ files for MapReduce Hadoop bioinformatics applications

2017

Abstract Summary MapReduce Hadoop bioinformatics applications require the availability of special-purpose routines to manage the input of sequence files. Unfortunately, the Hadoop framework does not provide any built-in support for the most popular sequence file formats like FASTA or BAM. Moreover, the development of these routines is not easy, both because of the diversity of these formats and the need for managing efficiently sequence datasets that may count up to billions of characters. We present FASTdoop, a generic Hadoop library for the management of FASTA and FASTQ files. We show that, with respect to analogous input management routines that have appeared in the Literature, it offers…

The colored longest common prefix array computed via sequential scans

2018

Due to the increased availability of large datasets of biological sequences, the tools for sequence comparison are now relying on efficient alignment-free approaches to a greater extent. Most of the alignment-free approaches require the computation of statistics of the sequences in the dataset. Such computations become impractical in internal memory when very large collections of long sequences are considered. In this paper, we present a new conceptual data structure, the colored longest common prefix array (cLCP), that allows to efficiently tackle several problems with an alignment-free approach. In fact, we show that such a data structure can be computed via sequential scans in semi-exter…

Ancient goat genomes reveal mosaic domestication in the Fertile Crescent

2018

How humans got their goatsLittle is known regarding the location and mode of the early domestication of animals such as goats for husbandry. To investigate the history of the goat, Dalyet al.sequenced mitochondrial and nuclear sequences from ancient specimens ranging from hundreds to thousands of years in age. Multiple wild populations contributed to the origin of modern goats during the Neolithic. Over time, one mitochondrial type spread and became dominant worldwide. However, at the whole-genome level, modern goat populations are a mix of goats from different sources and provide evidence for a multilocus process of domestication in the Near East. Furthermore, the patterns described suppor…

Health/Nutrition food claims and low-fat food purchase: Projected personality influence in young consumers

2017

Abstract Health/nutrition food claims are increasingly used in the food industry but firms still require deeper research to develop a better understanding of consumers in the low-fat food market. In pursuit of this goal, this paper analyses the influence of projected consumer personality on healthy claim credibility, Perceived product health, physical appearance and its repercussion on attitudes (overall attitude to the product) and behaviours (purchase intention). With a sample of 300 young consumers (15–25 years old) and through PLS techniques, our results show that project personality influences the credibility of claims about healthiness and physical appearance. Both concepts play a sig…

Common Hits Approach: Combining Pharmacophore Modeling and Molecular Dynamics Simulations.

2017

We present a new approach that incorporates flexibility based on extensive MD simulations of protein-ligand complexes into structure-based pharmacophore modeling and virtual screening. The approach uses the multiple coordinate sets saved during the MD simulations and generates for each frame a pharmacophore model. Pharmacophore models with the same pharmacophore features are pooled. In this way the high number of pharmacophore models that results from the MD simulation is reduced to only a few hundred representative pharmacophore models. Virtual screening runs are performed with every representative pharmacophore model; the screening results are combined and rescored to generate a single hi…

2017

AbstractWe asked if essentiality for either fertility or viability differentially affects sequence evolution of human testis proteins. Based on murine knockout data, we classified a set of 965 proteins expressed in human seminiferous tubules into three categories: proteins essential for prepubertal survival (“lethality proteins”), associated with male sub- or infertility (“male sub-/infertility proteins”), and nonessential proteins. In our testis protein dataset, lethality genes evolved significantly slower than nonessential and male sub-/infertility genes, which is in line with other authors’ findings. Using tissue specificity, connectivity in the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network,…

The desaturase1 gene affects reproduction before, during and after copulation in Drosophila melanogaster

2019

Desaturase1 (desat1) is one of the few genes known to be involved in the two complementary aspects of sensory communication — signal emission and signal reception — in Drosophila melanogaster. In p...