New strain of canine distemper in wild animals in NH, VT

The new strain of canine distemper virus was found in two gray foxes similar to these foxes.

A distinct strain of canine distemper virus, which is a widespread virus of importance to wildlife and domesticated dogs, has been identified in wild animals in New Hampshire and Vermont, according to pathologists with the New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Lab at the University of New Hampshire. No virus in this distinct subgroup of canine distemper virus has yet been reported in a domesticated dog.

"A distinct strain of canine distemper virus is circulating in multiple wildlife species in two contiguous states in Northern New England," said David Needle, senior veterinary pathologist and assistant clinical professor. "This strain is significantly distinct from the vaccine strains. A member of genus Morbillivirus that includes measles, canine distemper virus is highly contagious and causes severe disease in infected animals."

The new strain of canine distemper virus was identified by UNH pathologists in collaboration with colleagues at Cornell University, University of Georgia, Northeast Wildlife Disease Cooperative, N.H. Fish and Game, and Vermont Fish and Game. Over a one-year period, pathologists diagnosed canine distemper virus infection in eight largely carnivorous mammals in southeastern New Hampshire and north central Vermont. The animals included three fishers, two gray foxes, one skunk, one raccoon, and one mink.

Pathologists found all animals were infected with a distinct strain of the virus that had been identified only in a single raccoon in Rhode Island in 2004, which was not described in any publication. The eight animal cases also represent the only reports of any canine distemper virus isolated from New Hampshire and Vermont in the GenBank database/.

"This can and may already be having an impact on the population of wild mesocarnivores in New Hampshire and New England," said Needle. "These animals are an integral part of the varied ecosystems of wild New Hampshire and New England, filling important niches in predator-prey relationships and pest control. Any decrease in wildlife populations is a loss to the rich wild diversity. The affected species also are furbearing mammals that serve as part of the cultural heritage of the northern sportsman."

Canine distemper virus vaccination is part of the core vaccine protocols for domesticated dogs. All dogs should be vaccinated routinely. Canine distemper virus infection in dogs is most often characterized by respiratory disease, oral and nasal discharge, gastroenteritis, and as the disease progresses, neurological disease. This is a severe, highly pathogenic and highly contagious disease, so any suspected infection should be reported immediately to a veterinarian. Any unvaccinated animals should be vaccinated.

The results of this case are presented in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation. The research is supported by the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station and the State of New Hampshire.

The New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Lab is co-managed by the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, Markets & Food and the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station. Since 1970, the lab has provided accessible, timely and accurate diagnostic services for the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, Markets, & Food, New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, state and local law enforcement agencies, veterinarians, farmers, state, regional, and federal agencies, and individuals.

Read more at Science Daily

The perils of a leader who is too extroverted

Extroverts are often seen as natural leaders in organizations. But a new study suggests that some leaders may have too much of a good thing.

Researchers found that informal leaders were better liked and more sought after for advice when they hit a middle "sweet spot" on levels of assertiveness and warmth, two facets of extroversion.

Team members reacted less favorably to leaders who were high on assertiveness or warmth.

"Overly extroverted leaders can come across as too pushy or too annoying," said Jia (Jasmine) Hu, lead author of the study and associate professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.

"A moderate amount of assertiveness and warmth may be optimal."

The study did find one factor that helped highly extroverted leaders receive better marks from their peers: prosocial motivation, or the desire to look out for others' welfare.

The study appears online in the Journal of Applied Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.

The researchers did two related studies. The first involved 260 business undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to 78 self-managed teams. The students worked in their teams on a variety of projects through a full semester.

At the beginning of the semester, students rated themselves on two facets of extroversion. One was assertiveness, which is the desire to be dominant and forceful. The second was warmth, which is how friendly and outgoing they were.

The students' prosocial motivation was measured by asking them how much they agreed with statements like "I care about benefiting others through my work."

Later in the semester, students rated each member of their team on how much they showed leadership in their group activities. Based on these ratings, the researchers chose the person on each team who was seen by most of their peers as the leader.

Team members also rated how much they liked each of their team members and how much they went to him or her for advice in solving problems related to their tasks.

A second, nearly identical study involved 337 employees on work teams in a large retail company in China. Like with the students, these were self-managed teams without formal leaders.

Both studies had very similar results.

Leaders who were extroverted tended to be better liked and more sought after for advice by their team members -- but only up to a point.

Leaders who rated themselves as very assertive or very warm tended to see a drop-off in how much their fellow team members liked them and sought their advice.

Hu said it was a case of too much of a good thing.

"If you're too assertive as a team member, people think you're pushy and they don't like that," she said.

"And if you're too warm and friendly, that can be overwhelming for others who feel pressured to respond in the same enthusiastic way."

But fellow employees can put up with more extroversion if they think you're doing it for others.

"If you're prosocially motivated, people see more benefits to your assertiveness and warmth. They know you're not doing it just to promote yourself, but have a genuine interest in the whole team. That means a lot," Hu said.

While this study was done with informal leaders, Hu said she believes the results could also apply to formally chosen supervisors. And she noted that even in teams with formal bosses, informal leaders like those in this study often emerge and play a key role in a team's success.

Read more at Science Daily

Climate education for kids increases climate concerns for parents

A new study from North Carolina State University finds that educating children about climate change increases their parents' concerns about climate change.

"There's a robust body of work showing that kids can influence their parents' behavior and positions on environmental and social issues, but this is the first experimental study demonstrating that climate education for children promotes parental concern about climate change," says Danielle Lawson, lead author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at NC State.

For the study, researchers worked with middle school science teachers to incorporate a climate change curriculum into their classrooms. Prior to teaching the curriculum, researchers had 238 students and 292 parents take a survey to measure their levels of concern regarding climate change.

Seventy-two of the students and 93 of the parents were in a control group, meaning the students did not receive the climate change curriculum; 166 students and 199 parents were in an experimental group, meaning the students did receive the climate curriculum. All students and parents took the survey again after the students in the experimental group had completed the climate curriculum.

"We found that there was an increase in climate concern for both the experimental and control groups, but that the shift was much more pronounced in families where children were taught the curriculum," Lawson says.

The climate survey measured concern on a 17-point scale, ranging from -8 (not concerned at all) to +8 (extremely concerned). On average, students in the control group had an increase in concern of 0.72 points on the second survey, while their parents increased 1.37 points. Meanwhile, students in the experimental group had an increase of 2.78 points, while their parents increased 3.89 points.

"We also found that the results were most pronounced for three groups: conservative parents, parents of daughters, and fathers," Lawson says. This was noteworthy because conservatives and men are typically among the least concerned about climate change.

On average, conservative parents' level of concern increased 4.77 points; parents of daughters increased 4.15 points; and fathers increased 4.31 points. All these key groups went from being marginally not concerned (-2.1 for conservatives, -1.8 for those with daughters, and -0.9 for fathers, compared to a zero midpoint) to moderately concerned (2.5 for conservatives, 2.5 for those with daughters, and 3.6 for fathers). These post-test concern levels were much higher than those in the control group (conservatives: 0.25; those with daughters: -1.6, fathers: -0.8).

Notably, liberal and conservative parents in the treatment group ended up with similar levels of climate change concern by the end of the study. The 4.5 point gap in the pretest shrunk to 1.2 after children learned about climate change.

"This study tells us that we can educate children about climate change and they're willing to learn, which is exciting because studies find that many adults are resistant to climate education, because it runs counter to their personal identities," Lawson says. "It also highlights that children share that information with their parents, particularly if they're given tools to facilitate communication -- and that parents are willing to listen."

"To be clear, climate change education is about giving people a good foundation in climate science and cultivating critical thinking skills," says Kathryn Stevenson, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor of parks, recreation and tourism management at NC State. "This is about education, not activism, and children are great educators. They seem to help people critically consider ways in which being concerned about climate change may be in line with their values."

Read more at Science Daily

Nature's dangerous decline 'unprecedented,' species extinction rates 'accelerating'

Pacific Ocean.

Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history -- and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely, warns a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the summary of which was approved at the 7th session of the IPBES Plenary, meeting last week (29 April -- 4 May) in Paris.

"The overwhelming evidence of the IPBES Global Assessment, from a wide range of different fields of knowledge, presents an ominous picture," said IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson. "The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide."

"The Report also tells us that it is not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global," he said. "Through 'transformative change', nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably -- this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values."

"The member States of IPBES Plenary have now acknowledged that, by its very nature, transformative change can expect opposition from those with interests vested in the status quo, but also that such opposition can be overcome for the broader public good," Watson said.

The IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is the most comprehensive ever completed. It is the first intergovernmental Report of its kind and builds on the landmark Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, introducing innovative ways of evaluating evidence.

Compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries over the past three years, with inputs from another 310 contributing authors, the Report assesses changes over the past five decades, providing a comprehensive picture of the relationship between economic development pathways and their impacts on nature. It also offers a range of possible scenarios for the coming decades.

Based on the systematic review of about 15,000 scientific and government sources, the Report also draws (for the first time ever at this scale) on indigenous and local knowledge, particularly addressing issues relevant to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.

"Biodiversity and nature's contributions to people are our common heritage and humanity's most important life-supporting 'safety net'. But our safety net is stretched almost to breaking point," said Prof. Sandra Díaz (Argentina), who co-chaired the Assessment with Prof. Josef Settele (Germany) and Prof. Eduardo S. Brondízio (Brazil and USA).

"The diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems, as well as many fundamental contributions we derive from nature, are declining fast, although we still have the means to ensure a sustainable future for people and the planet."

The Report finds that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.

The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900. More than 40% of amphibian species, almost 33% of reef-forming corals and more than a third of all marine mammals are threatened. The picture is less clear for insect species, but available evidence supports a tentative estimate of 10% being threatened. At least 680 vertebrate species had been driven to extinction since the 16th century and more than 9% of all domesticated breeds of mammals used for food and agriculture had become extinct by 2016, with at least 1,000 more breeds still threatened.

"Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed," said Prof. Settele. "This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world."

To increase the policy-relevance of the Report, the assessment's authors have ranked, for the first time at this scale and based on a thorough analysis of the available evidence, the five direct drivers of change in nature with the largest relative global impacts so far. These culprits are, in descending order: (1) changes in land and sea use; (2) direct exploitation of organisms; (3) climate change; (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species.

The Report notes that, since 1980, greenhouse gas emissions have doubled, raising average global temperatures by at least 0.7 degrees Celsius -- with climate change already impacting nature from the level of ecosystems to that of genetics -- impacts expected to increase over the coming decades, in some cases surpassing the impact of land and sea use change and other drivers.

Despite progress to conserve nature and implement policies, the Report also finds that global goals for conserving and sustainably using nature and achieving sustainability cannot be met by current trajectories, and goals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors. With good progress on components of only four of the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, it is likely that most will be missed by the 2020 deadline. Current negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystems will undermine progress towards 80% (35 out of 44) of the assessed targets of the Sustainable Development Goals, related to poverty, hunger, health, water, cities, climate, oceans and land (SDGs 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 14 and 15). Loss of biodiversity is therefore shown to be not only an environmental issue, but also a developmental, economic, security, social and moral issue as well.

"To better understand and, more importantly, to address the main causes of damage to biodiversity and nature's contributions to people, we need to understand the history and global interconnection of complex demographic and economic indirect drivers of change, as well as the social values that underpin them," said Prof. Brondízio. "Key indirect drivers include increased population and per capita consumption; technological innovation, which in some cases has lowered and in other cases increased the damage to nature; and, critically, issues of governance and accountability. A pattern that emerges is one of global interconnectivity and 'telecoupling' -- with resource extraction and production often occurring in one part of the world to satisfy the needs of distant consumers in other regions."

Other notable findings of the Report include:

• Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions. On average these trends have been less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
• More than a third of the world's land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production.
• The value of agricultural crop production has increased by about 300% since 1970, raw timber harvest has risen by 45% and approximately 60 billion tons of renewable and non-renewable resources are now extracted globally every year -- having nearly doubled since 1980.
• Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of the global land surface, up to US$577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and 100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection.
• In 2015, 33% of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% were maximally sustainably fished, with just 7% harvested at levels lower than what can be sustainably fished.
• Urban areas have more than doubled since 1992.
• Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world's waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean 'dead zones', totalling more than 245,000 km2 (591-595) -- a combined area greater than that of the United Kingdom.
• Negative trends in nature will continue to 2050 and beyond in all of the policy scenarios explored in the Report, except those that include transformative change -- due to the projected impacts of increasing land-use change, exploitation of organisms and climate change, although with significant differences between regions.

The Report also presents a wide range of illustrative actions for sustainability and pathways for achieving them across and between sectors such as agriculture, forestry, marine systems, freshwater systems, urban areas, energy, finance and many others. It highlights the importance of, among others, adopting integrated management and cross-sectoral approaches that take into account the trade-offs of food and energy production, infrastructure, freshwater and coastal management, and biodiversity conservation.

Also identified as a key element of more sustainable future policies is the evolution of global financial and economic systems to build a global sustainable economy, steering away from the current limited paradigm of economic growth.

Read more at Science Daily

The sense of touch is formed in the brain before birth

All the surface of the human body is represented in the cerebral cortex in a transversal band localized at the external part of the cerebral hemispheres: the somatosensory cortex. Each body region occupies in that band a distinct extension depending on its use and sensitivity. For instance, the hands and the lips, on which humans rely most, occupy the largest area. Thus, the 3D representation of that map forms the known sensory homunculus.

Similar to a cartographic map, each represented region of the body in the somatosensory cortex is connected to its corresponding body surface thanks to the neuronal pathways that keep a strict topographical relationship along the nervous system. In this pathway, the thalamus, a deep structure of the brain that lies beneath the cortices, plays a key role by relaying the peripheral information to the cortex without losing the point-to-point correspondence. Using this extraordinary precision, we can discriminate which point of our body is receiving an external stimulus and have a well-defined map of the periphery. Such accurate topography constitutes the basis of the sense of touch and is essential for survival of the species.

How are the neurons of the somatosensory cortex organized during development to perform these functions? Neurons of this brain region, as in the rest of the cerebral cortex, are assembled into columns that are placed next to each other like building bricks. It remains unknown, however, how these columnar structures become functional correspondents of the distant regions of the periphery. Although some studies highlight the role of genetic factors to form initial columns, most studies in the past decade have emphasized that this disposition is achieved as a result of sensory experience during postnatal life.

Now a study by the UMH-CSIC Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante published in Science shows that cortical columns are already defined and fully functional before birth thanks to the spontaneous electrical activity of the embryonic thalamus. Far from being a mere relay station, the thalamus guides the formation of the functional cortical columns and the concomitant somatotopic map in the still immature cortex, before external sensory experience is an effective source of information. In particular, the thalamus does so by generating and transmitting patterns of spontaneous activity (called waves) to the developing cortex. The discovery was made in rodents, in a particular and extensive region of their somatosensory cortex: the barrel cortex. This area contains the representation of the whiskers of the snout that are, for rodents, sensorially equivalent to our hands.

"Our data reveal that the embryonic patterns of electrical activity of the thalamus, the brain structure through which sensory information passes to the cortex, organize the architecture of the cortical somatosensory map. The development of this map involves the emergence of functional cortical columns in embryos, driven by activity in the form of waves that spontaneously propagate through the thalamus," "We propose that this pattern of activity that takes place during the embryonic stages prepares the cortical areas and circuits for receiving information from the senses after birth," explains CSIC researcher Guillermina López-Bendito.

The researchers point out that since thalamic waves are not unique to the structure of the thalamus involved in the sense of touch but spread to other senses, such as vision or hearing, the cortical mapping principles described in this paper are likely shared by other sensory modalities.

"It is very probable that this mechanism involved in the formation of the sensory maps that we have discovered in rodents can be extrapolated to humans, because the organization of the cortex is evolutionarily conserved between species," explains López-Bendito.

"The spontaneous activity of the thalamus is not something circumstantial, but contains important information for the construction of the brain during embryonic development. It was previously thought that neuronal circuits were built on a genetic imprint and that the postnatal sensory experience ends up defining the maps. This work questions this vision because it demonstrates the existence of these maps before birth,"; says Lopez-Bendito. "Our results indicate that the spontaneous thalamic activity during the embryonic phase is essential for the normal development of the brain, defining what in neurobiology is called a critical period, i.e. a period of time in which plastic changes are possible but after which alterations would be irreparable"; she adds.

Read more at Science Daily

Arsenic-breathing life discovered in the tropical Pacific Ocean

Jaclyn Saunders (far right) fixes the line on a McLane instrument that pumps large volumes of seawater in order to extract the DNA. The instrument on the left measures properties such as temperature, salinity and depth and collects smaller samples of seawater.

Arsenic is a deadly poison for most living things, but new research shows that microorganisms are breathing arsenic in a large area of the Pacific Ocean. A University of Washington team has discovered that an ancient survival strategy is still being used in low-oxygen parts of the marine environment.

"Thinking of arsenic as not just a bad guy, but also as beneficial, has reshaped the way that I view the element," said first author Jaclyn Saunders, who did the research for her doctoral thesis at the UW and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We've known for a long time that there are very low levels of arsenic in the ocean," said co-author Gabrielle Rocap, a UW professor of oceanography. "But the idea that organisms could be using arsenic to make a living -- it's a whole new metabolism for the open ocean."

The researchers analyzed seawater samples from a region below the surface where oxygen is almost absent, forcing life to seek other strategies. These regions may expand under climate change.

"In some parts of the ocean there's a sandwich of water where there's no measureable oxygen," Rocap said. "The microbes in these regions have to use other elements that act as an electron acceptor to extract energy from food."

The most common alternatives to oxygen are nitrogen or sulfur. But Saunders' early investigations suggested arsenic could also work, spurring her to look for the evidence.

The team analyzed samples collected during a 2012 research cruise to the tropical Pacific, off the coast of Mexico. Genetic analyses on DNA extracted from the seawater found two genetic pathways known to convert arsenic-based molecules as a way to gain energy. The genetic material was targeting two different forms of arsenic, and authors believe that the pathways occur in two organisms that cycle arsenic back and forth between different forms.

Results suggest that arsenic-breathing microbes make up less than 1% of the microbe population in these waters. The microbes discovered in the water are probably distantly related to the arsenic-breathing microbes found in hot springs or contaminated sites on land.

"What I think is the coolest thing about these arsenic-respiring microbes existing today in the ocean is that they are expressing the genes for it in an environment that is fairly low in arsenic," Saunders said. "It opens up the boundaries for where we could look for organisms that are respiring arsenic, in other arsenic-poor environments."

Biologists believe the strategy is a holdover from Earth's early history. During the period when life arose on Earth, oxygen was scarce in both the air and in the ocean. Oxygen became abundant in Earth's atmosphere only after photosynthesis became widespread and converted carbon dioxide gas into oxygen.

Early lifeforms had to gain energy using other elements, such as arsenic, which was likely more common in the oceans at that time.

"We found the genetic signatures of pathways that are still there, remnants of the past ocean that have been maintained until today," Saunders said.

Arsenic-breathing populations may grow again under climate change. Low-oxygen regions are projected to expand, and dissolved oxygen is predicted to drop throughout the marine environment.

"For me, it just shows how much is still out there in the ocean that we don't know," Rocap said. Saunders recently collected more water samples from the same region and is now trying to grow the arsenic-breathing marine microbes in a lab in order to study them more closely.

"Right now we've got bits and pieces of their genomes, just enough to say that yes, they're doing this arsenic transformation," Rocap said. "The next step would be to put together a whole genome and find out what else they can do, and how that organism fits into the environment."

Read more at Science Daily

Researchers crack the peanut genome

Soroya Bertioli inspects peanut plants at the UGA Institute for Plant Breeding, Genetics and Genomics greenhouse.

Working to understand the genetics of peanut disease resistance and yield, researchers led by scientists at the University of Georgia have uncovered the peanut's unlikely and complicated evolution.

Researchers working as part of the International Peanut Genome Initiative have previously pinpointed one of the peanut's two wild ancestors and shown that the peanut is a living legacy of some of the earliest human agricultural societies in South America. Since then the team has mapped the entire peanut genome and identified the crop's second wild ancestor and the novel mechanism by which the shy, seed-hoarding plant generated the diversity we see today.

"Because of its complex genetic structure sequencing peanut was only possible using very recent developments in sequencing technology. The result is of unprecedented quality, and provides a reference framework for breeding and improvement of the peanut crop, and a whole new set of insights into the extraordinary genetic structure of peanut," said David Bertioli, Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator and peanut researcher at the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

Bertioli conducts his research through the CAES Institute for Plant Breeding, Genetics and Genomics, which is home to some of the world's foremost experts in this area of crop science and has been prolific in providing new genomic tools and information to help plant breeders around the world develop more sustainable, productive crop varieties.

The team's most recent paper was published in the journal Nature Genetics and is available online.

According to the USDA, farmers around the world grow 44.9 million metric tons of peanuts on more than 64 million acres. The crop is a staple food in many parts of Africa and Asia and is a source of peanut butter, snacks and cooking oil in the United States. In Georgia alone farmers grow $825 million in peanuts each year.

Despite their importance as a crop, plant researchers haven't had many of the genetic tools needed to speed the introduction of more sustainable and productive peanut varieties. That was because, until recently, scientists had been unable to map the peanuts' hypercomplex tetraploid genome. The Peanut Genome Initiative's international collaboration and advancements in technologies and data processing yielded the breakthroughs.

Peanut genome sequenced

The bedrock of the team's discoveries was the sequencing of the genome. Because the peanut originated from the hybridization of two wild ancestral species thousands of years ago, the initial phases of the project involved researchers developing genome sequences for those ancestors. Together, the ancestral genomes made a prototype for the genetic structure of cultivated peanuts. This was published in 2016.

This month, the Peanut Genome Initiative discusses the entire genome sequence for the modern cultivated peanut in a paper published in Nature Genetics on May 1.

The researchers used new advances in DNA-sequencing technologies to produce a complete genome sequence of unprecedented quality. The sequence consists of more than 2.5 billion base pairs of DNA arranged in 20 pairs of chromosomes, 10 pairs from each of the ancestral species.

The information in the sequence sheds light on parts of the plant's genetic code that control traits like seed size and disease resistance, which are important to plant breeders. But the sequence also revealed more about the origin of peanut during the dawn of agriculture in South America and on the genetic mechanisms that have generated diversity and allowed adaptation to environments around the globe.

The mother of peanut

Using the new genome sequence as a framework, the team was able to analyze the variations in more than 200 of the most diverse peanuts from all of over the world. Researchers found characteristic genetic fingerprints shared by all the peanut plants tested, providing new evidence that all modern peanut varieties stem from the same original hybrid.

"The new study underlines how peanut's origin was due to very special circumstances thousands of years ago. Ancient farmers transported one species into the range of another, allowing their hybridization and the formation of a new crop species," said Soraya Leal-Bertioli, a senior research scientist with the UGA Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics and Genomics and the CAES department of plant pathology.

Scientists with the initiative had previously found the male donor of the original hybrid and origin of peanut's "B" subgenome. In this new study they identified the female donor, tracking the population of wild ancestral peanut that contributed the peanut "A" subgenome in Rio Seco, Argentina. These individuals form the "mother" population of peanut.

But the evidence that all modern peanuts can be traced to a single original hybrid sets up another mystery, Leal-Bertioli said. How does a plant with such a narrow genetic base develop so many variations and varieties?

"Shuffling, shuffling"

Most flowering plant species rely on animals or weather to spread their pollen or seeds to other plants to generate genetic diversity. Pollen and seeds can travel for miles, spreading newly occurring traits to new populations.

But peanuts, which produce their seeds underground, don't do that. It took early human farmers and their long-distance transport of seeds to get the first two ancestral peanut parents together.

Since then, however, the plant has used a new mechanism for creating diversity.

The peanut has two sets of chromosomes, one from each ancestor. By analyzing more than 200 cultivated peanuts from all over the world, it was shown that different landraces and cultivars have shuffled the genetic material of the ancestors and deleted some sections altogether. Over the past the 10,000 years, this shuffling has happened thousands of times -- allowing a much faster-paced generation of diversity than if the plants simply relied on mutation.

In a greenhouse on the UGA campus, the Bertiolis have worked with hybrids that re-create the original ancestral peanut and observed the shuffling in real time. They documented its effects in the spontaneous appearance of different flower colors. These same genetic mechanisms generate other types of variation as well, said David Bertioli.

Read more at Science Daily

Giant panda's bamboo diet still looks surprisingly carnivorous

This photograph shows a wild panda feeding on bamboo leaves in the Foping Nature Reserve.

Giant pandas are unusual in being extremely specialized herbivores that feed almost exclusively on highly fibrous bamboo, despite belonging to a clade (Carnivora) of primarily flesh-eating carnivores. But a study reported in Current Biology on May 2 suggests that the switch to a restricted vegetarian diet wasn't, in some respects, as big an evolutionary leap as it seems.

The study finds that the protein and carbohydrate content of the panda's plant diet looks surprisingly like that of a hypercarnivore, animals that obtain more than 70 percent of their diet from other animals, they report. About 50 percent of the panda's energy intake comes in the form of protein, placing them right alongside feral cats and wolves.

"As we know, the giant panda is a Carnivora species, yet extremely specialized on a plant food, the bamboo," said Fuwen Wei of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. "Based on what they eat, they absolutely belong to the herbivores, but considering the macronutrient composition of the ingested and absorbed diets, they belong to the carnivores."

The pandas do have traits in common with herbivores, including a skull, jaw musculature, and dentition that are adapted for fibrous diets, and a specialized "pseudo-thumb" used for handling bamboo. They've also lost the ability to taste umami, which is often associated with meat eating. On the other hand, giant pandas have a digestive tract, digestive enzymes, and gut microbes that resemble that of carnivores and not herbivores.

In the new study, Wei teamed up with nutritional ecologist David Raubenheimer from the University of Sydney and colleagues to explore the macronutrient composition of their diet, including what the pandas ingest and what they absorb. Using an approach called nutritional geometry, the team showed that the macronutrient mix that giant pandas both eat and absorb is similar to carnivores, and unlike herbivores. The macronutrient composition of the panda's milk also places it squarely among other carnivores.

The researchers say the findings can help resolve long-standing questions concerning the evolution of the giant panda, including the unusual transition to extreme specialized herbivory by a member of a carnivorous clade. "In fact," they write, "the transition was likely more superficial than assumed, combining substantial adaptation to new food types with relatively smaller changes in macronutrient handling."

The herbivorous diet led to evolutionary adaptations in their teeth, skull, and pseudo-thumb needed to process bamboo. But their gut and digestive system changed little, suggesting minimal evolutionary modification from their ancestral state was needed to deal with the macronutritional properties of bamboo. Their short gut, together with the abundance of bamboo, allows the panda to consume and process large amounts of bamboo, compensating for the low digestive efficiency of such a fibrous diet.

"There is also a broader message from this study," says Raubenheimer. "It demonstrates the importance of considering both foods and nutrients in understanding the evolutionary ecology of animals. This is what nutritional geometry is designed to do."

Read more at Science Daily

A genomic tour-de-force reveals the last 5,000 years of horse history

This image shows a herd of Kazakh horses in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan in August 2016.

Each year on the first Saturday in May, Thoroughbred horses reach speeds of over 40 miles per hour as they compete to win the Kentucky Derby. But the domestic horse wasn't always bred for speed. In fact, an international team now has evidence to suggest that the modern horse is genetically quite different from the horses of even just a few hundred years ago.

Their work, appearing May 2 in the journal Cell, constructs the genetic history of the domestic horse across the world over the last 5,000 years by using the largest genome collection ever generated for a non-human organism. The findings identify two new horse lineages that are now extinct and suggest that familiar traits such as speed were only selected for more recently in their history.

"The horse has impacted human history like no other animal," says Ludovic Orlando, a research director with CNRS and the University of Toulouse and a Professor of Molecular Archaeology at the University of Copenhagen. "If you look at the historical record from the Bronze Age onward, horses are always part of the equation up until very recent times, connecting civilizations and impacting transportation, warfare, and agriculture. Our goal was to understand how humans and their activities transformed the horse throughout history to fit their purposes -- and how these changes in biology influenced human history."

The team responsible for this project consisted of 121 collaborators, including geneticists, archaeologists, and evolutionary biologists from 85 institutions around the world, and examined genome-scale data from 278 horse specimens from across Eurasia over the last 42,000 years.

"Such a large collection of data means that we can build a much more precise understanding of horse domestication and management through space and time," Orlando says. "But it was truly an interdisciplinary effort because of course it takes a lot more than just DNA to understand such a story. We had to integrate all these social, historical, and geographical aspects."

Overall, the team's findings suggest that equine history was much more complex than was previously realized. Today, there are only two known lineages of horses, the domestic horse and the Przewalski's horse. But the researchers here identified two additional now-extinct lineages of horses, one from the Iberian Peninsula and one from Siberia, both of which still existed 4,000-4,500 years ago. "We found two lineages of horses at the far ends of Eurasia that are not related to what we call the domestic horse today, nor to the Przewalski's horse. They are a sort of horse equivalent of what Neanderthals are to modern humans," Orlando says.

The researchers also found a major shift in the genetic makeup of horses in Europe and Central Asia in the 7th to 9th centuries and say this shift probably corresponds to Islamic expansions. The horses common in Europe before that time are now only found in regions such as Iceland; the new European horses after that time were much more similar to horses found in Persia during the Sassanid Empire. When the team performed a scan to identify genes that had been selected for in these Persian horses, they found evidence of selection in genes associated with body shape.

"It was a moment in history that reshaped the landscape of horses in Europe. If you look at what we today call Arabian horses, you know that they have a different shape -- and we know how popular this anatomy has been throughout history, including in racing horses. Based on the genomic evidence, we propose that this horse was so successful and influential because it brought a new anatomy and perhaps other favorable traits," he says.

The researchers found that there have been additional significant and recent changes in the domestic horse. Similar selection scans indicate that only in the last 1,500 years did traits such as ambling and speed over short distances become more actively sought. And when they looked at the overall genetic diversity of the domestic horse, the researchers found a sharp decline in the last 200 to 300 years. They believe this decline corresponds with new breeding practices that were introduced with the rise of the concept of "pure" breeds.

"What we picture as a horse today and what we picture as a horse from a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago was likely actually very different. Some of those traits that we are most familiar with are only a modern invention, and in the last few hundred years, we have actually impacted the horse genome a lot more than in the previous 4,000 years of domestication," says Orlando.

He believes that this research can tell us a lot about both the past and the present. "Our findings show that the past is a lot more diverse than we thought it was and that it cannot be imagined or inferred through modern-day variation. But ancient DNA tells us a lot about today as well, because it teaches us about the consequences of some shifts in breeding practices," he says. And that, he believes, can also affect the way we think about conservation and modern agricultural practices.

Of course, our understanding of the domestic horse's history is far from complete. Orlando acknowledges that there are geographic and temporal gaps in his story. Perhaps mostly glaringly, we still don't know when and or where the horse was domesticated. "Horse domestication is central to human history, and in 2019, we still don't understand where it started. That's mind-blowing," he says.

Read more at Science Daily

Two neutron stars collided near the solar system billions of years ago

If a comparable event happened today at a similar distance from the solar system, the ensuing radiation would outshine the entire night sky.

Astrophysicists Szabolcs Marka at Columbia University and Imre Bartos at the University of Florida, have identified a violent collision of two neutron stars 4.6 billion years ago as the likely source of some of the most coveted matter on Earth.

This single cosmic event, close to our solar system, gave birth to 0.3 percent of the Earth's heaviest elements, including gold, platinum and uranium, according to a new paper appearing in the May 2 issue of Nature.

"This means that in each of us we would find an eyelash worth of these elements, mostly in the form of iodine, which is essential to life," Bartos said. "A wedding ring, which expresses a deep human connection, is also a connection to our cosmic past predating humanity and the formation of Earth itself, with about 10 milligrams of it likely having formed 4.6 billion years ago."

"Meteorites forged in the early solar system carry the traces of radioactive isotopes," said Bartos, who received his Ph.D. at Columbia.

"As these isotopes decay they act as clocks that can be used to reconstruct the time they were created," Marka said.

To arrive at their conclusion, Bartos and Marka compared the composition of meteorites to numerical simulations of the Milky Way. They found that a single neutron-star collision could have occurred about 100 million years before the formation of Earth, in our own neighborhood, about 1000 light years from the gas cloud that eventually formed the Solar System.

The Milky Way galaxy itself is 100,000 light years in diameter, or 100 times the distance of this cosmic event from the cradle of Earth. "If a comparable event happened today at a similar distance from the Solar System, the ensuing radiation could outshine the entire night sky," Marka said.

The researchers believe that their study provides insight into a uniquely consequential event in our history. "It sheds bright light on the processes involved in the origin and composition of our solar system, and will initiate a new type of quest within disciplines, such as chemistry, biology and geology, to solve the cosmic puzzle," Bartos said.

"Our results address a fundamental quest of humanity: Where did we come from and where are we going? It is very difficult to describe the tremendous emotions we felt when realized what we had found and what it means for the future as we search for an explanation of our place in the universe, " Marka said.

From Science Daily