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Mosaic analysis with double markers reveals cell type specific paternal growth dominance
No full textGenomic imprinting leads to preferred expression of either the maternal or paternal alleles of a subset of genes. Imprinting is essential for mammalian development, and its deregulation causes many diseases. However, the functional relevance of imprinting at the cellular level is poorly understood for most imprinted genes. We used mosaic analysis with double markers (MADM) in mice to create uniparental disomies (UPDs) and to visualize imprinting effects with single-cell resolution. Although chromosome 12 UPD did not produce detectable phenotypes, chromosome 7 UPD caused highly significant paternal growth dominance in the liver and lung, but not in the brain or heart. A single gene on chromosome 7, encoding the secreted insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2), accounts for most of the paternal dominance effect. Mosaic analyses implied additional imprinted loci on chromosome 7 acting cell autonomously to transmit the IGF2 signal. Our study reveals chromosome- and cell-type specificity of genomic imprinting effects
A new species of tapir from the Amazon
Get PDFAll known species of extant tapirs are allopatric: 1 in southeastern Asia and 3 in Central and South America. The fossil record for tapirs, however, is much wider in geographical range, including Europe, Asia, and North and South America, going back to the late Oligocene, making the present distribution a relict of the original one. We here describe a new species of living Tapirus from the Amazon rain forest, the 1st since T. bairdii Gill, 1865, and the 1st new Perissodactyla in more than 100 years, from both morphological and molecular characters. It is shorter in stature than T. terrestris (Linnaeus, 1758) and has distinctive skull morphology, and it is basal to the clade formed by T. terrestris and T. pinchaque (Roulin, 1829). This highlights the unrecognized biodiversity in western Amazonia, where the biota faces increasing threats. Local peoples have long recognized our new species, suggesting a key role for traditional knowledge in understanding the biodiversity of the region
Genetic hitch-hiking in spatially extended populations
Get PDFWhen a mutation with selective advantage s spreads through a panmictic population, it may cause two lineages at a linked locus to coalesce; the probability of coalescence is exp(−2rT), where T∼log(2Ns)/s is the time to fixation, N is the number of haploid individuals, and r is the recombination rate. Population structure delays fixation, and so weakens the effect of a selective sweep. However, favourable alleles spread through a spatially continuous population behind a narrow wavefront; ancestral lineages are confined at the tip of this front, and so coalesce rapidly. In extremely dense populations, coalescence is dominated by rare fluctuations ahead of the front. However, we show that for moderate densities, a simple quasi-deterministic approximation applies: the rate of coalescence within the front is λ∼2g(η)/(ρℓ), where ρ is the population density and is the characteristic scale of the wavefront; g(η) depends only on the strength of random drift, . The net effect of a sweep on coalescence also depends crucially on whether two lineages are ever both within the wavefront at the same time: even in the extreme case when coalescence within the front is instantaneous, the net rate of coalescence may be lower than in a single panmictic population. Sweeps can also have a substantial impact on the rate of gene flow. A single lineage will jump to a new location when it is hit by a sweep, with mean square displacement ; this can be substantial if the species’ range, L, is large, even if the species-wide rate of sweeps per map length, Λ/R, is small. This effect is half as strong in two dimensions. In contrast, the rate of coalescence between lineages, at random locations in space and on the genetic map, is proportional to (c/L)(Λ/R), where c is the wavespeed: thus, on average, one-dimensional structure is likely to reduce coalescence due to sweeps, relative to panmixis. In two dimensions, genes must move along the front before they can coalesce; this process is rapid, being dominated by rare fluctuations. This leads to a dramatically higher rate of coalescence within the wavefront than if lineages simply diffused along the front. Nevertheless, the net rate of coalescence due to a sweep through a two-dimensional population is likely to be lower than it would be with panmixis
Modelling evolution in a spatial continuum
Get PDFWe survey a class of models for spatially structured populations
which we have called spatial Λ-Fleming–Viot processes. They arise from a flexible
framework for modelling in which the key innovation is that random genetic drift
is driven by a Poisson point process of spatial 'events'. We demonstrate how this
overcomes some of the obstructions to modelling populations which evolve in two-
(and higher-) dimensional spatial continua, how its predictions match phenomena
observed in data and how it fits with classical models. Finally we outline some
directions for future research
Partial enumeration and curvature regularization
No full textEnergies with high-order non-submodular interactions have been shown to be very useful in vision due to their high modeling power. Optimization of such energies, however, is generally NP-hard. A naive approach that works for small problem instances is exhaustive search, that is, enumeration of all possible labelings of the underlying graph. We propose a general minimization approach for large graphs based on enumeration of labelings of certain small patches.
This partial enumeration technique reduces complex high-order energy formulations to pairwise Constraint Satisfaction Problems with unary costs (uCSP), which can be efficiently solved using standard methods like TRW-S. Our approach outperforms a number of existing state-of-the-art algorithms on well known difficult problems (e.g. curvature regularization, stereo, deconvolution); it gives near global minimum and better speed.
Our main application of interest is curvature regularization. In the context of segmentation, our partial enumeration technique allows to evaluate curvature directly on small patches using a novel integral geometry approach
Automatic Linearizability Proofs of Concurrent Objects with Cooperating Updates
Get PDFAn execution containing operations performing queries or updating a concurrent object is linearizable w.r.t an abstract implementation (called specification) iff for each operation, one can associate a point in time, called linearization point, such that the execution of the operations in the order of their linearization points can be reproduced by the specification. Finding linearization points is particularly difficult when they do not belong to the operations’s actions. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing a new technique for rewriting the implementation of the concurrent object and its specification such that the new implementation preserves all executions of the original one, and its linearizability (w.r.t. the new specification) implies the linearizability of the original implementation (w.r.t. the original specification). The rewriting introduces additional combined methods to obtain a library with a simpler linearizability proof, i.e., a library whose operations contain their linearization points. We have implemented this technique in a prototype, which has been successfully applied to examples beyond the reach of current techniques, e.g., Stack Elimination and Fetch&Add
Mechanism of protein kinetic stabilization by engineered disulfide crosslinks
No full textThe impact of disulfide bonds on protein stability goes beyond simple equilibrium thermodynamics effects associated with the conformational entropy of the unfolded state. Indeed, disulfide crosslinks may play a role in the prevention of dysfunctional association and strongly affect the rates of irreversible enzyme inactivation, highly relevant in biotechnological applications. While these kinetic-stability effects remain poorly understood, by analogy with proposed mechanisms for processes of protein aggregation and fibrillogenesis, we propose that they may be determined by the properties of sparsely-populated, partially-unfolded intermediates. Here we report the successful design, on the basis of high temperature molecular-dynamics simulations, of six thermodynamically and kinetically stabilized variants of phytase from Citrobacter braakii (a biotechnologically important enzyme) with one, two or three engineered disulfides. Activity measurements and 3D crystal structure determination demonstrate that the engineered crosslinks do not cause dramatic alterations in the native structure. The inactivation kinetics for all the variants displays a strongly non-Arrhenius temperature dependence, with the time-scale for the irreversible denaturation process reaching a minimum at a given temperature within the range of the denaturation transition. We show this striking feature to be a signature of a key role played by a partially unfolded, intermediate state/ensemble. Energetic and mutational analyses confirm that the intermediate is highly unfolded (akin to a proposed critical intermediate in the misfolding of the prion protein), a result that explains the observed kinetic stabilization. Our results provide a rationale for the kinetic-stability consequences of disulfide-crosslink engineering and an experimental methodology to arrive at energetic/structural descriptions of the sparsely populated and elusive intermediates that play key roles in irreversible protein denaturation
The effect of one additional driver mutation on tumor progression
No full textTumor growth is caused by the acquisition of driver mutations, which enhance the net reproductive rate of cells. Driver mutations may increase cell division, reduce cell death, or allow cells to overcome density-limiting effects. We study the dynamics of tumor growth as one additional driver mutation is acquired. Our models are based on two-type branching processes that terminate in either tumor disappearance or tumor detection. In our first model, both cell types grow exponentially, with a faster rate for cells carrying the additional driver. We find that the additional driver mutation does not affect the survival probability of the lesion, but can substantially reduce the time to reach the detectable size if the lesion is slow growing. In our second model, cells lacking the additional driver cannot exceed a fixed carrying capacity, due to density limitations. In this case, the time to detection depends strongly on this carrying capacity. Our model provides a quantitative framework for studying tumor dynamics during different stages of progression. We observe that early, small lesions need additional drivers, while late stage metastases are only marginally affected by them. These results help to explain why additional driver mutations are typically not detected in fast-growing metastases
The influence of demography and local mating environment on sex ratios in a wind-pollinated dioecious plant
No full textNegative frequency-dependent selection should result in equal sex ratios in large populations of dioecious flowering plants, but deviations from equality are commonly reported. A variety of ecological and genetic factors can explain biased sex ratios, although the mechanisms involved are not well understood. Most dioecious species are long-lived and/or clonal complicating efforts to identify stages during the life cycle when biases develop. We investigated the demographic correlates of sex-ratio variation in two chromosome races of Rumex hastatulus, an annual, wind-pollinated colonizer of open habitats from the southern USA. We examined sex ratios in 46 populations and evaluated the hypothesis that the proximity of males in the local mating environment, through its influence on gametophytic selection, is the primary cause of female-biased sex ratios. Female-biased sex ratios characterized most populations of R. hastatulus (mean sex ratio = 0.62), with significant female bias in 89% of populations. Large, high-density populations had the highest proportion of females, whereas smaller, low-density populations had sex ratios closer to equality. Progeny sex ratios were more female biased when males were in closer proximity to females, a result consistent with the gametophytic selection hypothesis. Our results suggest that interactions between demographic and genetic factors are probably the main cause of female-biased sex ratios in R. hastatulus. The annual life cycle of this species may limit the scope for selection against males and may account for the weaker degree of bias in comparison with perennial Rumex species
3D kinetic alpha complexes and their implementation
No full textMotivated by an application in cell biology, we describe an extension of the kinetic data structures framework from Delaunay triangulations to fixed-radius alpha complexes. Our algorithm is implemented
using CGAL, following the exact geometric computation paradigm. We report on several
techniques to accelerate the computation that turn our implementation applicable to the underlying biological
problem