Project description:Two major forms of equine αS2-casein arising from genomic 1.3 kb in-frame deletion involving two coding exons, one of which represents an equid specific duplication. Findings at the DNA-level have been verified by cDNA sequencing from horse milk of mares with different genotypes. At the protein-level, we were able to show by SDS-page and in-gel digestion with subsequent LC-MS analysis that both proteins are actually expressed
Project description:Transposable elements (TEs) are self-mobilizing elements that make up a large fraction of mammalian genomes. PIWI proteins and PIWI interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are a part of a system aimed at controlling and preventing TE proliferation. We examined the TE landscape and piRNA repertoires from three non-model Laurasiatherian mammals (dog, horse and big brown bat) with differing TE complements and proliferation patterns to address questions about the evolutionary relationships between piRNAs and TEs. We found that the genomic abundance of new TEs may not match TE transcription. We speculate that a higher rate of SINE targeting by piRNAs in the horse genome contributed to the reduced SINE insertion rate.
Project description:The Drosophila brain is a work horse in neuroscience. Single-cell transcriptome analysis, 3D morphological classification, and detailed mapping of the connectome have revealed an immense diversity of neuronal and glial cell types that underlie the wide array of functional and behavioral traits in the fruit fly. The developmental trajectories of each of these cell types, from neuroblast to mature neuron or glial cell, as well as their maintenance and plasticity in the adult brain, are controlled by gene regulatory networks (GRNs) In this study, we profiled chromatin accessibility of 240,000 single cells, spanning nine developmental time points from larval, pupal, and adult brains, and integrated this data with single-cell transcriptomes. This atlas reveals the regulatory connections between genomic enhancers and the single-cell transcriptomes for more than 80 cell types in the fly brain. Each cell type is characterized by a unique chromatin accessibility landscape, with thousands of specific regulatory regions, summing to a total of 95,931 regulatory regions that are used in the brain. Exploiting this resource, we find that the combination of expressed transcription factors is reflected by their respective motif architecture within cell type-specific enhancers.