Complete Genome Sequences of Phages EarickHC, Figueroism, FinalFrontier, SBlackberry, Skylord, and Slay isolated using .

Phages EarickHC, Figueroism, FinalFrontier, SBlackberry, Skylord, and Slay were isolated from soil samples collected around Southern California using the host All six phages are lytic and have a siphoviral morphology. Genomes are 39,843 to 52,992 bp in length and contain 58 to 91 protein coding genes.

Neuropeptide-dependent spike time precision and plasticity in circadian output neurons.

Circadian rhythms influence various physiological and behavioral processes such as sleep-wake cycles, hormone secretion, and metabolism. In , an important set of circadian output neurons are called pars intercerebralis (PI) neurons, which receive input from specific clock neurons called DN1. These DN1 neurons can further be subdivided into functionally and anatomically distinctive anterior (DN1a) and posterior (DN1p) clusters.

You are How You Eat: Foraging Behavior as a Potential Novel Marker of Rat Affective State.

Unlabelled: Effective and safe foraging requires animals to behave according to the expectations they have about the rewards, threats, and costs in their environment. Since these factors are thought to be reflected in the animals' affective states, we can use foraging behavior as a window into those states. In this study, rats completed a foraging task in which they had repeatedly to decide whether to continue to harvest a food source despite increasing time costs, or to forgo food to switch to a different food source.

Considerations for the design and conduct of pediatric obesity pharmacotherapy clinical trials: Proceedings of expert roundtable meetings.

Anti-obesity medications (AOMs) have emerged as one element of comprehensive obesity clinical care intended to improve long-term health outcomes for children and adolescents. The number of pediatric AOM clinical trials has burgeoned in recent years as new pharmacotherapeutics have been developed. Factors related to growth and development in children and adolescents can present unique challenges in terms of designing and conducting clinical trials investigating the safety and efficacy of AOMs.

Exploring the similarities between risk factors triggering depression in humans and elevated in-cage "inactive but awake" behavior in laboratory mice.

Introduction: Depression is a human mental disorder that can also be inferred in non-human animals. This study explored whether time spent inactive but awake ("IBA") in the home-cage in mice was further triggered by risk factors similar to those increasing vulnerability to depression in humans (early life stress, genetic predispositions, adulthood stress).

Methods: Eighteen DBA/2 J and 18 C57BL/6 J females were tested, of which half underwent as pups a daily maternal separation on post-natal days 2-14 (early-life stress "ELS") (other half left undisturbed).

A Rare Case of NUT Carcinoma of the Thyroid.

NUT carcinoma is an aggressive, poorly differentiated squamous cell carcinoma, defined by rearrangement of the (Nuclear Protein in Testis) gene. Diagnosis is challenging due to histologic similarities with other poorly differentiated tumors requiring advanced diagnostic techniques. There is no established treatment, and prognosis remains extremely poor.

Membrane-coated glass electrodes for stable, low-noise electrophysiology recordings in Drosophila central neurons.

Background: Electrophysiological recording with glass electrodes is one of the best techniques to measure membrane potential dynamics and ionic currents of voltage-gated channels in neurons. However, artifactual variability of the biophysical state variables that determine recording quality can be caused by insufficient affinity between the electrode and cell membrane during the recording.

New Method: We introduce a phospholipid membrane coating on glass electrodes to improve intracellular electrophysiology recording quality.

A primer on the use of computational modelling to investigate affective states, affective disorders and animal welfare in non-human animals.

Objective measures of animal emotion-like and mood-like states are essential for preclinical studies of affective disorders and for assessing the welfare of laboratory and other animals. However, the development and validation of measures of these affective states poses a challenge partly because the relationships between affect and its behavioural, physiological and cognitive signatures are complex. Here, we suggest that the crisp characterisations offered by computational modelling of the underlying, but unobservable, processes that mediate these signatures should provide better insights.

Affective trajectories: Are hens influenced by positive and negative changes in their living conditions?

Most studies of the effects of housing and husbandry on animals' affective states and welfare investigate the impact of living conditions, comparing for example, animals living in enriched environments with those living in non-enriched ones. in living conditions, including from more to less enriched environments, have also been found to have effects on measures of affective state and welfare in some species. But these studies have not investigated whether it is the that has affected the animals (e.

Are Brachycephalic Dogs Really Cute? Evidence from Online Descriptions.

Brachycephalic dog breeds have become increasingly popular in recent years, despite showing a high incidence of conformation-related disorders and early mortality. It has been suggested that this popularity might be explained by public perceptions of these short-muzzled dogs as looking particularly infant-like or "cute." Here, the hypothesis that short-muzzled breeds are especially likely to be described as cute was investigated by analyzing the word contents of advertisements for dogs and puppies being sold online.

A mapping review of refinements to laboratory rat housing and husbandry.

Refining the housing and husbandry of laboratory rats is an important goal, both for ethical reasons and to allow better quality research. We conducted a mapping review of 1,017 studies investigating potential refinements of housing and husbandry of the laboratory rat to assess what refinements have, and have not, been studied, and to briefly assess whether there is evidence to support any impact on rat welfare. Among the many refinements studied, the majority involve changes to the cage, but some also involve alterations to the wider environment.

That brachycephalic look: Infant-like facial appearance in short-muzzled dog breeds.

Brachycephalic dog breeds are highly popular, yet their conformation-related disorders represent a major welfare concern. It has been suggested that the current popularity of such breeds can be explained by their cute, infant-like facial appearances. The concept of 'kindchenschema' refers to the observation that certain physical features of infant humans and other animals can automatically stimulate positive and nurturant feelings in adult observers.

Online Dog Sale Advertisements Indicate Popularity of Welfare-Compromised Breeds.

Kennel club registrations have been used in a number of studies to estimate ownership levels and fashion trends among dog breeds. They cannot, however, give a complete overview of the contemporary trade in pet dogs, and additionally, may be particularly poor at monitoring trends among some welfare-vulnerable breeds. Here, we compared data from online advertisements for the UK sales of single-breed dogs over an 18-month period, with equivalent data (including for prior and subsequent years) from the UK Kennel Club.

Bridging the Gap: Human Emotions and Animal Emotions.

Our experiences of the conscious mental states that we call emotions drive our interest in whether such states also exist in other animals. Because linguistic report can be used as a gold standard (albeit indirect) indicator of subjective in humans but not other species, how can we investigate animal emotions and what exactly do we mean when we use this term? Linguistic reports of human emotion give rise to (discrete emotions; dimensional models), associated objectively measurable behavioral and bodily , and understanding of the that generate specific states. We argue that many animal studies implicitly translate human emotion , and , but that explicit consideration of the underlying pathways of inference, their theoretical basis, assumptions, and pitfalls, and how they relate to , is needed to provide greater clarity and less confusion in the conceptualization and scientific study of animal emotion.

Developing guidelines for pet rat housing through expert consultation.

Background: Pet care guidelines play an important role in ensuring that owners are well informed about good husbandry practices, allowing them to provide the best care for their animals. However, the development of such guidelines is difficult when there is little appropriate empirical evidence on which to base guidelines, as in the case of pet rats. The consultation of multiple experts can help to surmount this challenge.

Characterization of Phages YuuY, KaiHaiDragon, and OneinaGillian Isolated from .

is a Gram-positive bacteria found in organic matter. Three lytic bacteriophages, KaiHaiDragon, OneinaGillian, and YuuY, were isolated from strain NRRL B-24224. Phage YuuY in particular expresses a broad host range as it possesses the ability to infect closely related bacterial species at a high plating efficiency.

Worth the risk? Contemporary indications, yield and complications of lumbar punctures in a metropolitan Australian health service.

Background: Performing lumbar punctures carries a risk of harm to the patient, but the information cerebrospinal fluid provides often makes this procedure necessary. Clinicians in the Australian setting would benefit from having more information on these procedures, in order to help them in a risk versus benefit analysis.

Aims: To describe the contemporary indications, cerebrospinal fluid findings and complications of lumbar punctures in a metropolitan Australian health service.

Magnetic Fields with Precise Quasisymmetry for Plasma Confinement.

Quasisymmetry is an unusual symmetry that can be present in toroidal magnetic fields, enabling the confinement of charged particles and plasma. Here it is shown that both quasiaxisymmetry and quasihelical symmetry can be achieved to a much higher precision than previously thought over a significant volume, resulting in exceptional confinement. For a 1 Tesla mean field far from axisymmetry (vacuum rotational transform >0.

Space, feature, and risk sensitivity in homing pigeons (Columba livia): Broadening the conversation on the role of the avian hippocampus in memory.

David Sherry has been a pioneer in investigating the avian hippocampal formation (HF) and spatial memory. Following on his work and observations that HF is sensitive to the occurrence of reward (food), we were interested in carrying out an exploratory study to investigate possible HF involvement in the representation goal value and risk. Control sham-lesioned and hippocampal-lesioned pigeons were trained in an open field to locate one food bowl containing a constant two food pellets on all trials, and two variable bowls with one containing five pellets on 75% (High Variable) and another on 25% (Low Variable) of their respective trials (High-Variable and Low-Variable bowls were never presented together).

Do greater levels of in-cage waking inactivity in laboratory mice reflect a spontaneous depression-like symptom? A pharmacological investigation.

We previously identified in laboratory mice an inactive state [being awake with eyes open motionless within the home cage; inactive but awake, 'IBA'] sharing etiological factors and symptoms with human clinical depression. We further test the hypothesis that greater time spent displaying IBA indicates a depression-like state in mice by investigating whether the antidepressant Venlafaxine, environmental enrichment, and their combination, alleviate IBA. Seventy-two C57BL/6J and 72 DBA/2J female mice were pseudo-randomly housed post-weaning in mixed strain-pairs in non-enriched (NE; 48 pairs) or in environmentally enriched (EE; 24 pairs) cages.

Using Primary Reinforcement to Enhance Translatability of a Human Affect and Decision-Making Judgment Bias Task.

Good translatability of behavioral measures of affect (emotion) between human and nonhuman animals is core to comparative studies. The judgment bias (JB) task, which measures "optimistic" and "pessimistic" decision-making under ambiguity as indicators of positive and negative affective valence, has been used in both human and nonhuman animals. However, one key disparity between human and nonhuman studies is that the former typically use secondary reinforcers (e.

Pet rat welfare in the United Kingdom: The good, the bad and the ugly.

Background: To date, despite the substantial literature investigating how rats prefer to be kept in captivity, no research has been conducted to assess the housing, husbandry and health of pet rats.

Methods: To better understand the United Kingdom's pet rat population and the welfare issues they face, we conducted an online survey of pet rat owners. The survey included questions about the owner and their opinions about pet rats, and about their rats' health, husbandry and housing.