Project description:The Ashanti Dwarf Pig (ADP) of Ghana is an endangered pig breed with hardy and disease resistant traits. Characterisation of animal genetic resources provides relevant data for their conservation and sustainable use for food security and economic development. We investigated the origin and phylogenetic status of the local ADP of Ghana and their crosses with modern commercial breeds based on mtDNA, MC1R and Y-chromosome sequence polymorphisms, and genome-wide SNP genotyping. The study involved 164 local pigs sampled from the three agro-ecological zones of Ghana. Analyses of the mitochondrial D-loop region and Y-chromosome sequences revealed that the ADP of Ghana has both European and Asian genetic signatures. The ADP also displays considerable variation in the MC1R gene. Black coat colour is the most predominant within the breed, with the dominant black alleles of both Asian and European origin contributing to the majority of alleles in the pool. European alleles for spotting are present at a low frequency in the sample set, and may account for the occurrence of spotted piglets in some APD litters. Other colour variants may be due to epistatic interactions with additional coat colour loci, or mutations. The wide variations in coat colour patterns suggest that morphology alone cannot be used to adequately characterise Ghanaian local pigs. PCA analysis of SNP genotyping data revealed a strong location effect on clustering of local Ghanaian pigs. Based on this work, we recommend that further studies be carried out on more local pigs to find out the effect of admixture on important adaptive and economic traits of the ADP and other local Sus breeds in Africa to help develop a sustainable conservation programmes to prevent the decline of this genetic resource.
Project description:Effect-based methods (EBM) are of growing interest in environmental monitoring programs. Few EBM have incorporated transcriptomics even though these provide a wealth of biological information and can be modeled to yield transcriptomic points of departure (tPODs). The study objectives were to: A) characterize cytotoxic effects of soil extracts on the rainbow trout RTgill-W1 and the human Caco-2 cell lines; B) measure gene expression changes and calculate tPODs; and C) compare in vitro responses to available measures of plastic-related compounds and metals. Extracts were prepared from 35 soil samples collected at the Agbogbloshie E-waste site (Accra, Ghana). Cells were exposed to six soil concentrations (0.3 to 9.4 mg dry weight of extract (eQsed)/ml). Many samples caused cytotoxicity with RTgill cells being more sensitive than Caco-2 cells. Eleven samples were analyzed for transcriptomics in both cell lines, with responses measured in all samples (52 to 5925 differentially expressed genes) even in the absence of cytotoxicity. In RTgill cells there was concordance between cytotoxic measures in tPOD values (spearman = 0.85). Though trends between in vitro measures and contaminant data were observed, more work is needed in this area before definitive conclusions are drawn. Nonetheless, this study helps support ongoing efforts in establishing alternative testing strategies (e.g., alternative to animal methods; toxicogenomics) for the assessment of complex environmental samples.
Project description:Anopheles gambiae S form adults were drawn from the GAH laboratory colony that originated from the Ahafo region in Ghana. The GAH colony exhibits extensive insecticide resistance (bendiocarb, DDT, dieldrin, permethrin, deltamethrin). Gene expression was compared between blood-fed and sugar-fed females (3 hours after feeding) using a custom array focussing on around 300 detoxification-related genes.
Project description:Purpose: Deconstructing the soil microbiome into reduced-complexity functional modules represents a novel method of microbiome analysis. The goals of this study are to confirm differences in transcriptomic patterns among five functional module consortia. Methods: mRNA profiles of 3 replicates each of functional module enrichments of soil inoculum in M9 media with either 1) xylose, 2) n-acetylglucosamine, 3) glucose and gentamycin, 4) xylan, or 5) pectin were generated by sequencing using an Illumina platform (GENEWIZ performed sequencing). Sequence reads that passed quality filters were aligned to a soil metagenome using Burrows Wheeler Aligner. Resulting SAM files were converted to raw reads using HTSeq, and annotated using Uniref90 or EGGNOG databases. Results: To reduce the size of the RNA-Seq counts table and increase its computational tractability, transcripts containing a minimum of 75 total counts, but no more than 3 zero counts, across the 15 samples were removed. The subsequent dataset was normalized using DESeq2, resulting in a dataset consisting of 6947 unique transcripts across the 15 samples, and 185,920,068 reads. We identified gene categories that were enriched in a sample type relative to the overall dataset using Fisher’s exact test. Conclusions: our dataset confirms that the functional module consortia generated from targeted enrichments of a starting soil inoculum had distinct functional trends by enrichment type.