Outcomes of dogs with apocrine gland anal sac adenocarcinoma treated via modified closed anal sacculectomy (2015-2022).

Objective: To evaluate the postoperative complication rate and local recurrence rate of apocrine gland anal sac adenocarcinoma (AGASACA) in dogs surgically treated with a modified closed anal sacculectomy technique between 2015 and 2022.

Study Design: Observational clinical retrospective study.

Animal Population: Forty-seven client-owned dogs histologically diagnosed with AGASACA.

Untangling the oxidative cost of reproduction: An analysis in wild banded mongooses.

The cost of reproduction plays a central role in evolutionary theory, but the identity of the underlying mechanisms remains a puzzle. Oxidative stress has been hypothesized to be a proximate mechanism that may explain the cost of reproduction. We examine three pathways by which oxidative stress could shape reproduction.

The value of teaching increases with tool complexity in cumulative cultural evolution.

Human cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) is recognized as a powerful ecological and evolutionary force, but its origins are poorly understood. The long-standing view that CCE requires specialized social learning processes such as teaching has recently come under question, and cannot explain why such processes evolved in the first place. An alternative, but largely untested, hypothesis is that these processes gradually coevolved with an increasing reliance on complex tools.

A targeted rural postgraduate education programme - linking rural doctors across New Zealand and into the Pacific.

This article describes the University of Otago Rural Postgraduate medical programme, established in 2002 to provide a targeted rural education option for medical practitioners working in rural and remote areas of New Zealand. With both faculty and participants dispersed throughout New Zealand and the Cook Islands embedded in day to day rural clinical practice, this programme uniquely reflects the national and international clinical networks it has been developed to support. It now provides the academic component of two vocational training programmes: the New Zealand Rural Hospital Medicine Training Programme and The Cook Islands General Practice Training Programme.

colonization in asthmatic patients not receiving oral corticosteroid therapy.

Unlabelled: can colonize patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. To determine if colonization occurs in asthma patients, sputum samples from 10 patients with mild asthma, who were not receiving oral corticosteroids, were evaluated by a sensitive real-time PCR assay that targets a multicopy gene of 2 patients (20%) had DNA detected; 1 patient had 3 positive samples over an 11-day period. Thus, colonization occurs in asthma patients, and further studies are warranted to evaluate its role in airways disease.

Selection on an antagonistic behavioral trait can drive rapid genital coevolution in the burying beetle, Nicrophorus vespilloides.

Male and female genital morphology varies widely across many taxa, and even among populations. Disentangling potential sources of selection on genital morphology is problematic because each sex is predicted to respond to adaptations in the other due to reproductive conflicts of interest. To test how variation in this sexual conflict trait relates to variation in genital morphology we used our previously developed artificial selection lines for high and low repeated mating rates.

Genome analysis of three Pneumocystis species reveals adaptation mechanisms to life exclusively in mammalian hosts.

Pneumocystis jirovecii is a major cause of life-threatening pneumonia in immunosuppressed patients including transplant recipients and those with HIV/AIDS, yet surprisingly little is known about the biology of this fungal pathogen. Here we report near complete genome assemblies for three Pneumocystis species that infect humans, rats and mice. Pneumocystis genomes are highly compact relative to other fungi, with substantial reductions of ribosomal RNA genes, transporters, transcription factors and many metabolic pathways, but contain expansions of surface proteins, especially a unique and complex surface glycoprotein superfamily, as well as proteases and RNA processing proteins.

Sequencing and characterization of the complete mitochondrial genomes of three Pneumocystis species provide new insights into divergence between human and rodent Pneumocystis.

Pneumocystis jirovecii is an important opportunistic pathogen associated with AIDS and other immunodeficient conditions. Currently, very little is known about its nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. In this study, we sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) of this organism and its closely related species Pneumocystis carinii and Pneumocystis murina by a combination of sequencing technologies.