Emerging New Crop Pests: Ecological Modelling and Analysis of the South American Potato Psyllid Russelliana solanicola (Hemiptera: Psylloidea) and Its Wild Relatives

© 2017 Syfert et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Effects of long-term exposure to an electronic containment system on the behaviour and welfare of domestic cats

Free-roaming cats are exposed to a variety of risks, including involvement in road traffic accidents. One way of mitigating these risks is to contain cats, for example using an electronic boundary fence system that delivers an electric ‘correction’ via a collar if a cat ignores a warning cue and attempts to cross the boundary. However, concerns have been expressed over the welfare impact of such systems. Our aim was to determine if long-term exposure to an electronic containment system was associated with reduced cat welfare. We compared 46 owned domestic cats: 23 cats that had been contained by an electronic containment system for more than 12 months (AF group); and 23 cats with no containment system that were able to roam more widely (C group). We assessed the cats’ behavioural responses and welfare via four behavioural tests (unfamiliar person test; novel object test; sudden noise test; cognitive bias test) and an owner questionnaire. In the unfamiliar person test, C group lip-licked more than the AF group, whilst the AF group looked at, explored and interacted more with the unfamiliar person than C group. In the novel object test, the AF group looked at and explored the object more than C group. No significant differences were found between AF and C groups for the sudden noise or cognitive bias tests. Regarding the questionnaire, C group owners thought their cats showed more irritable behaviour and AF owners thought that their cats toileted inappropriately more often than C owners. Overall, AF cats were less neophobic than C cats and there was no evidence of significant differences between the populations in general affective state. These findings indicate that an electronic boundary fence with clear pre-warning cues does not impair the long term quality of life of cat

Humanized Mice Recapitulate Key Features of HIV-1 Infection: A Novel Concept Using Long-Acting Anti-Retroviral Drugs for Treating HIV-1

BACKGROUND: Humanized mice generate a lymphoid system of human origin subsequent to transplantation of human CD34+ cells and thus are highly susceptible to HIV infection. Here we examined the efficacy of antiretroviral treatment (ART) when added to food pellets, and of long-acting (LA) antiretroviral compounds, either as monotherapy or in combination. These studies shall be inspiring for establishing a gold standard of ART, which is easy to administer and well supported by the mice, and for subsequent studies such as latency. Furthermore, they should disclose whether viral breakthrough and emergence of resistance occurs similar as in HIV-infected patients when ART is insufficient. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: NOD/shi-scid/γ(c)null (NOG) mice were used in all experimentations. We first performed pharmacokinetic studies of the drugs used, either added to food pellets (AZT, TDF, 3TC, RTV) or in a LA formulation that permitted once weekly subcutaneous administration (TMC278: non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor, TMC181: protease inhibitor). A combination of 3TC, TDF and TMC278-LA or 3TC, TDF, TMC278-LA and TMC181-LA suppressed the viral load to undetectable levels in 15/19 (79%) and 14/14 (100%) mice, respectively. In successfully treated mice, subsequent monotherapy with TMC278-LA resulted in viral breakthrough; in contrast, the two LA compounds together prevented viral breakthrough. Resistance mutations matched the mutations most commonly observed in HIV patients failing therapy. Importantly, viral rebound after interruption of ART, presence of HIV DNA in successfully treated mice and in vitro reactivation of early HIV transcripts point to an existing latent HIV reservoir. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: This report is a unique description of multiple aspects of HIV infection in humanized mice that comprised efficacy testing of various treatment regimens, including LA compounds, resistance mutation analysis as well as viral rebound after treatment interruption. Humanized mice will be highly valuable for exploring the antiviral potency of new compounds or compounds targeting the latent HIV reservoir

The Ecological Conditions That Favor Tool Use and Innovation in Wild Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops sp.)

Dolphins are well known for their exquisite echolocation abilities, which enable them to detect and discriminate prey species and even locate buried prey. While these skills are widely used during foraging, some dolphins use tools to locate and extract prey. In the only known case of tool use in free-ranging cetaceans, a subset of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.) in Shark Bay, Western Australia habitually employs marine basket sponge tools to locate and ferret prey from the seafloor. While it is clear that sponges protect dolphins' rostra while searching for prey, it is still not known why dolphins probe the substrate at all instead of merely echolocating for buried prey as documented at other sites. By ‘sponge foraging’ ourselves, we show that these dolphins target prey that both lack swimbladders and burrow in a rubble-littered substrate. Delphinid echolocation and vision are critical for hunting but less effective on such prey. Consequently, if dolphins are to access this burrowing, swimbladderless prey, they must probe the seafloor and in turn benefit from using protective sponges. We suggest that these tools have allowed sponge foraging dolphins to exploit an empty niche inaccessible to their non-tool-using counterparts. Our study identifies the underlying ecological basis of dolphin tool use and strengthens our understanding of the conditions that favor tool use and innovation in the wild

Fishery-Independent Data Reveal Negative Effect of Human Population Density on Caribbean Predatory Fish Communities

BACKGROUND: Understanding the current status of predatory fish communities, and the effects fishing has on them, is vitally important information for management. However, data are often insufficient at region-wide scales to assess the effects of extraction in coral reef ecosystems of developing nations. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here, I overcome this difficulty by using a publicly accessible, fisheries-independent database to provide a broad scale, comprehensive analysis of human impacts on predatory reef fish communities across the greater Caribbean region. Specifically, this study analyzed presence and diversity of predatory reef fishes over a gradient of human population density. Across the region, as human population density increases, presence of large-bodied fishes declines, and fish communities become dominated by a few smaller-bodied species. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Complete disappearance of several large-bodied fishes indicates ecological and local extinctions have occurred in some densely populated areas. These findings fill a fundamentally important gap in our knowledge of the ecosystem effects of artisanal fisheries in developing nations, and provide support for multiple approaches to data collection where they are commonly unavailable

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe