Project description:The extreme environments of the Tibetan Plateau offer significant challenges to human survival, demanding novel adaptations. While the role of biological and agricultural adaptations in enabling early human colonization of the plateau has been widely discussed, the contribution of pastoralism is less well understood, especially the dairy pastoralism that has historically been central to Tibetan diets. Here, we analyze preserved proteins from the dental calculus of 40 ancient individuals to report the earliest direct evidence of dairy consumption on the Tibetan Plateau. Our palaeoproteomic results demonstrate that dairy pastoralism began on the higher plateau by approximately 3,500 years ago, more than 2,000 years earlier than the recording of dairying in historical sources. With less than 1% of the Tibetan Plateau dedicated to farmland, pastoralism and the milking of ruminants were essential for large-scale human expansion into agriculturally-marginal regions that make up the majority of the plateau. Dairy pastoralism allowed conversion of abundant grasslands into nutritional human food, which facilitating adaptation in the face of extreme climatic and altitudinal pressures, and maximizing the land area available for long-term human occupation of the “roof of the world”.
Project description:This data was used to identify regions of the genome that have undergone positive selection in a high-altitude Tibetan population. Affymetrix SNP arrays were used to genotype DNA extracted from blood samples. This data was used to perform genome-wide scans of positive selection in a native high-altitude Tibetan population.
Project description:Single cell RNA sequencing was used to explore the long-term maintenance of immune memory cells and their functionality for the first time in this animal model. It revealed an increase in pertussis-specific T cells frequency in DTaP primed minipigs, together with up-regulation of genes involved in antigen presentation and interferon pathways.
Project description:Tibet is one of the most threatened regions by climate warming, thus understanding how its microbial communities function may be of high importance for predicting microbial responses to climate changes. Here, we report a study to profile soil microbial structural genes, which infers functional roles of microbial communities, along four sites/elevations of a Tibetan mountainous grassland, aiming to explore potential microbial responses to climate changes via a strategy of space-for-time substitution. Using a microarray-based metagenomics tool named GeoChip 4.0, we showed that microbial communities were distinct for most but not all of the sites. Substantial variations were apparent in stress, N and C cycling genes, but they were in line with the functional roles of these genes. Cold shock genes were more abundant at higher elevations. Also, gdh converting ammonium into urea was more abundant at higher elevations while ureC converting urea into ammonium was less abundant, which was consistent with soil ammonium contents. Significant correlations were observed between N-cycling genes (ureC, gdh and amoA) and nitrous oxide flux, suggesting that they contributed to community metabolism. Lastly, we found by CCA, Mantel tests and the similarity tests that soil pH, temperature, NH4+M-bM-^@M-^SN and vegetation diversity accounted for the majority (81.4%) of microbial community variations, suggesting that these four attributes were major factors affecting soil microbial communities. Based on these observations, we predict that climate changes in the Tibetan grasslands are very likely to change soil microbial community functional structure, with particular impacts on microbial N cycling genes and consequently microbe-mediated soil N dynamics. Twelve samples were collected from four elevations (3200, 3400, 3600 and 3800 m) along a Tibetan grassland; Three replicates in every elevation
Project description:To investigate the upstream regulatory networks in myogenesis that lead to the establishment of the myogenic lineage and subsequent differentiation, we proformed scATAC-seq of pig somite and myotome cells from Tibetan pigs (ZZ) and Duroc×Tibetan pigs (DZ) at several embryonic stages (E18, E21, and E28).
Project description:To investigate the upstream regulatory networks in myogenesis that lead to the establishment of the myogenic lineage and subsequent differentiation, we proformed scRNA-seq of pig somite and myotome cells from Tibetan pigs (ZZ) and Duroc×Tibetan pigs (DZ) at several embryonic stages (E16, E18, E21, and E28).
Project description:We used transcriptomics to identify vascular gene expression profiles of high-fat-fed Tibetan minipig induced-hypercholesterolemia and atherosclerotic models, to verify the hypothesis that hypercholesterolemia induces innate and adaptive immune responses to accelerate atherosclerosis. Results showed that hypercholesterolemia and atherosclerosis models occurred in the high-fat fed minipigs at 8 and 24 weeks. GSEA analysis showed that the changes of hypercholesterolemia accelerated atherosclerosis were focused on immunity inflammation and lipid metabolism, immune cells such as NK cells and T cells participated in the biological processes. 4 significant modules of 344 overlapping DEGs were identified by STEM analysis. 6 hub genes (ITGB2, TYROBP, LCP2, PTPRC, C5AR1, and PTPN6) and two immune-related pathways (Natural killer cell-mediated cytotoxicity and T cell receptor signaling pathway) were identified by CytoHubba plugin and KEGG analysis. Correlation analysis showed that hub genes were significantly correlated with lipid deposition, IMT, WBC, CD4, and CD8, which was consistent with RT-PCR validation results. From above, this study reveals that hypercholesterolemia accelerate atherosclerosis progression by inducing innate and adaptive immune responses.
Project description:In this study, miRNA-seq technique was used to identify differentially expressed miRNAs (DE miRNAs) in cardiac muscle of the Tibetan pig (TP) and Yorkshire pig (YP), which were both raised in highland environments. We obtained 108 M clean reads and 372 unique miRNAs that included 210 known pre-miRNAs and 162 novel pre-miRNAs. In addition, 20 DE miRNAs, including 10 upregulated and 10 downregulated miRNAs, were identified by comparing TP and YP. Based on the expression abundance and differentiation between the two populations, we predicted their targets, and KEGG pathway analyses suggested that DE miRNAs between the Tibetan pigs and Yorkshire pigs are involved in hypoxia-related pathways, such as the MAPK, mTOR, and VEGF signaling pathways, cancer-related signaling pathways, etc. Five DE miRNAs were randomly selected to validate the veracity of miRNA-seq using real-time PCR. The results showed that the expression corresponds to the trend in miRNA-seq, hence the deep-sequencing methods were feasible and efficient. This study expanded the number of hypoxic-adaptation-related miRNAs in pig and indicated that the expression patterns of hypoxia-related miRNAs are significantly altered in the Tibetan pig. DE miRNAs may play important roles in hypoxic adaptation after migration to hypoxic environments. mRNA profiles of 6-month old Tibetan pig (TP) and Yorkshire pig (YP) were generated by deep sequencing, in duplicate, using Hiseq 2000.
Project description:In this study, methylated DNA immunoprecipitation and high-throughput sequencing (MeDIP-seq) was used to provide an atlas of DNA methylomes in the heart tissue of hypoxic highland Tibetan and lowland Chahua chicken embryos.A total of 31.2 gigabases (Gb) of sequence data were generated from six MeDIP-seq libraries. We identified 1049 differentially methylated regions (DMRs) and 695 related differentially methylated genes (DMGs) between the two chicken breeds. The DMGs were involved in vascular smooth muscle contraction, VEGF signaling pathway, calcium signaling pathway, and other hypoxia related pathways. Five candidate genes that had low methylation (EDNRA, EDNRB, BMPR1B, BMPRII, and ITGA2) might have key regulatory functions for hypoxia adaptation in Tibetan chicken embryos. Our study provides significant explanations for the functions of genes and their epigenetic regulation for hypoxic adaptation in Tibetan chickens.