Genome

... Complete nucleotide sequence of an infectious clone of a mild isolate of tomato yellow leaf curl ... The nucleotide sequence of a field isolate of a TYLCV-like virus from Israel ... pBI121 was propagated in E. coli HB101 and shuttled into Agrobacterium tumefaciens LAB4404 (Clontech ...

Late December 2019, a new virus outbreak was detected in Wuhan, Hubei province China and later spread all over the world. The virus is a new strain of the β - Coronavirus (SARS - CoV - 2) with a single strand positive sense RNA, and a genome size of 29,890 kb that codes for 9744 amino acids. Not many mutations are depicted in the SARS - CoV - 2 genome, However, most of them are detec ted in the ORF8 region and the spike. The latter exhibits higher affinity with the Human ACE2 receptor than the SARS - CoV. Alignment of SARS - CoV - 2 genome with other Corona viruses shows a high similarity to the Bat - CoV, but this latter was not enough to con clude that the Bat is the origin of the Human SARS - CoV - 2. This review aimed to provide an overview of the viral genome structure and its origin .

We used overlapping and nested homozygous deletions, contig building, genomic sequencing, and physical and transcript mapping to further define a approximately 630-kb lung cancer homozygous deletion region harboring one or more tumor suppressor genes (TSGs) on chromosome 3p21.3. This location was identified through somatic genetic mapping in tumors, cancer cell lines, and premalignant lesions of the lung and breast, including the discovery of several homozygous deletions. The combination of molecular manual methods and computational predictions permitted us to detect, isolate, characterize, and annotate a set of 25 genes that likely constitute the complete set of protein-coding genes residing in this approximately 630-kb sequence. A subset of 19 of these genes was found within the deleted overlap region of approximately 370-kb. This region was further subdivided by a nesting 200-kb breast cancer homozygous deletion into two gene sets: 8 genes lying in the proximal approximately 120-...

Endogenous DNA damage is causally associated with the functional decline and transformation of stem cells that characterize ageing. DNA lesions that have escaped DNA repair can induce replication stress and genomic breaks that induce senescence and apoptosis. It is not clear how stem and proliferating cells cope with accumulating endogenous DNA lesions, and how these ultimately affect the physiology of cells and tissues. Here we have addressed these questions by investigating the hematopoietic system of mice deficient for Rev1, a core factor in DNA translesion synthesis (TLS), the post-replicative bypass of damaged nucleotides. Rev1 hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells displayed compromised proliferation, and replication stress that could be rescued with an antioxidant. The additional disruption of Xpc, essential for global-genome nucleotide excision repair (ggNER) of helix-distorting nucleotide lesions, resulted in the perinatal loss of hematopoietic stem cells, progressive loss...

Precise and stable gene editing in mammalian cell lines has until recently been hampered by the lack of efficient targeting methods. While different gene silencing strategies have had tremendous impact on many biological fields, they have generally not been applied with wide success in the field of glycobiology, primarily due to their low efficiencies, with resultant failure to impose substantial phenotypic consequences upon the final glycosylation products. Here, we review novel nuclease-based precision genome editing techniques enabling efficient and stable gene editing, including gene disruption, insertion, repair, modification and deletion. The nuclease-based techniques comprised of homing endonucleases, zinc finger nucleases, transcription activator-like effector nucleases, as well as the RNA-guided clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat/Cas nuclease system, all function by introducing single or double-stranded breaks at a defined genomic sequence. We here com...

The radiation of surfperches (Embiotocidae) in the temperate North Pacific has been suggested to be the product of ecological competition and niche partitioning. Surfperches are a family of viviparous marine fishes, which have been used to study multiple paternity, sperm competition, and population genetics. Phylogenetic inference is essential for interpreting the evolutionary context of embiotocid life history traits and testing alternative scenarios, yet previous studies have yielded phylogenies with low support and incongruent topologies. Here we constructed reduced representation genomic libraries using restriction-site associated DNA (RAD) sequence markers to infer phylogenetic relationships among all genera and 22 out of 24 embiotocid species. Orthologous markers retained across 91% of sampled species, corresponding to 523 loci, yielded trees with the highest support values. Our results support a scenario where embiotocids first diverged into clades associated with sandy and r...

The International Crocodilian Genomes Working Group (ICGWG) will sequence and assemble the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) and Indian gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) genomes. The status of these projects and our planned analyses are described.

Plants are the major source of therapeutic ingredients in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). However, species adulteration in traded medicinal plant raw drugs threatens the reliability and safety of CAM. Since morphological features of medicinal plants are often not intact in the raw drugs, DNA barcoding was employed for species identification. Adulteration in 112 traded raw drugs was tested after creating a reference DNA barcode library consisting of 1452 rbcL and matK barcodes from 521 medicinal plant species. Species resolution of this library was 74.4%, 90.2%, and 93.0% for rbcL, matK, and rbcL + matK, respectively. DNA barcoding revealed adulteration in about 20% of the raw drugs, and at least 6% of them were derived from plants with completely different medicinal or toxic properties. Raw drugs in the form of dried roots, powders, and whole plants were found to be more prone to adulteration than rhizomes, fruits, and seeds. Morphological resemblance, co-occurrence, m...