Project description:Background: Personalized medicine is predicated on the notion that individual biochemical and genomic profiles are relatively constant in times of good health and to some extent predictive of disease or therapeutic response. We report a pilot study quantifying gene expression and methylation profile consistency over time, addressing the reasons for individual uniqueness, and its relation to N=1 phenotypes. Methods: Whole blood samples from 4 African American women, 4 Caucasian women, and 4 Caucasian men drawn from the Atlanta Center for Health Discovery and Well Being study at three successive 6-month intervals were profiled by RNASeq, miRNASeq, and Illumina Methyl-450 arrays. Standard regression approaches were used to evaluate the proportion of variance for each type of omic measure that is among individuals, and to quantify correlations among measures and with clinical attributes related to wellness. Results: Longitudinal omic profiles are in general highly consistent over time, with an average of 67% of the variance in transcript abundance, 42% of CpG methylation level (but 88% for the most differentiated CpG per gene), and 50% of miRNA abundance among individuals, which are all comparable to 74% of the variance among individuals for 74 clinical traits. One third of the variance can be attributed to differential blood cell type abundance, which is also fairly stable over time, and a lesser amount to eQTL effects, whereas seven conserved axes of covariance that capture diverse aspects of immune function explain over half of the variance. These axes also explain a considerable proportion of individually extreme transcript abundance, namely approximately 100 genes that are significantly up- or down-regulated in each person and are in some cases enriched for relevant gene activities that plausibly associate with clinical attributes. A similar fraction of genes have individually divergent methylation levels, but these do not overlap with the transcripts, and fewer than 20% of genes have significantly correlated methylation and gene expression. Conclusions: People express an “omic personality” consisting of peripheral blood transcriptional and epigenetic profiles that are constant over the course of a year and reflect various types of immune activity. Baseline genomic profiles can provide a window into the molecular basis of traits that might be useful for explaining medical conditions or guiding personalized health decisions. Whole blood samples from 12 subjects drawn from the Atlanta Center for Health Discovery and Well Being study at three successive 6-month intervals were profiled by RNASeq, miRNASeq, and Illumina Methyl-450 arrays.

Project description:In the past decade, several conceptual papers have linked variation in animal personality to variation in cognition, and recent years have seen a flood of empirical studies testing this link. However, these results have not been synthesized in a quantitative way. Here, we systematically search the literature and conduct a phylogenetically controlled meta-analysis of empirical papers that have tested the relationship between animal personality (exploration, boldness, activity, aggression and sociability) and cognition (initial learning/reversal speed, number of correct choices/errors after standard training). We find evidence for a small but significant relationship between variation in personality and variation in learning across species in the absolute scale; however, the direction of this relationship is highly variable and when both positive and negative effect sizes are considered, the average effect size does not differ significantly from zero. Importantly, this variation among studies is not explained by differences in personality or learning measure, or taxonomic grouping. Further, these results do not support current hypotheses suggesting that that fast-explorers are fast-learners or that slow-explorers perform better on tests of reversal learning. Rather, we find evidence that bold animals are faster learners, but only when boldness is measured in response to a predator (or simulated predator) and not when boldness is measured by exposure to a novel object (or novel food). Further, although only a small sub-sample of papers reported results separately for males and females, sex explained a significant amount of variation in effect size. These results, therefore, suggest that, while personality and learning are indeed related across a range of species, the direction of this relationship is highly variable. Thus further empirical work is needed to determine whether there are important moderators of this relationship.This article is part of the theme issue 'Causes and consequences of individual differences in cognitive abilities'.

Project description:Recent research suggests that personality, defined as consistent individual behavioral variation, in farm animals could be an important factor when considering their health, welfare, and productivity. However, behavioral tests are often performed individually and they might not reflect the behavioral differences manifested in every-day social environments. Furthermore, the contextual and longer-term temporal stability of personality traits have rarely been investigated in adult dairy cattle. In this study, we tested three groups of lactating Holstein cows (40 cows) using an individual arena test and a novel object test in groups to measure the contextual stability of behavior. Among the recorded individual test parameters, we used seven in the final analysis, which were determined by a systematic parameter reduction procedure. We found positive correlations between novel object contact duration in the group test and individual test parameters object contact duration (Rs = 0.361, P = 0.026) and movement duration (Rs = 0.336, P = 0.039). Both tests were repeated 6 months later to investigate their temporal stability whereby four individual test parameters were repeatable. There was no consistency in the group test results for 25 cows tested twice, possibly due to group composition changes. Furthermore, based on the seven individual test parameters, two personality traits (activity/exploration and boldness) were identified by principal component analysis. We found a positive association between the first and second tests for activity/exploration (Rs = 0.334, P = 0.058) and for boldness (Rs = 0.491, P = 0.004). Our results support the multidimensional nature of personality in adult dairy cattle and they indicate a link between behavior in individual and within-group situations. The lack of stability according to the group test results implies that group companions might have a stronger influence on individual behavior than expected. We suggest repeating the within-group behavioral measurements to study the relationship between the social environment and the manifestation of personality traits in every-day situations.

Dataset Information

Personality consistency in dogs: a meta-analysis.

Publications

Personality consistency in dogs: a meta-analysis.

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