The Contribution of Rat Studies to Current Knowledge of Major Depressive Disorder: Results From Citation Analysis.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the most severe depression type and one of the leading causes of morbidity worldwide. Animal models are widely used to understand MDD etiology, pathogenesis, and treatment, but the efficacy of this research for patients has barely been systematically evaluated. Such evaluation is important given the resource consumption and ethical concerns incurred by animal use.

Genetic evidence for spatio-temporal changes in the dispersal patterns of two sympatric African colobine monkeys.

Western black-and-white colobus and Temmink's red colobus are two forest-dependent African primates with similar ecological requirements, often found in sympatry. Their most striking difference lies in their social system: black-and-white colobus live in small groups with mainly male-mediated dispersal but where females can also disperse, whereas red colobus live in larger groups with males described as philopatric. To investigate whether genetic evidence supports the reported patterns of dispersal based on observational data, we examined eight black-and-white and six red colobus social groups from Cantanhez National Park, Guinea-Bissau.

Novel genes from formation to function.

The study of the evolution of novel genes generally focuses on the formation of new coding sequences. However, equally important in the evolution of novel functional genes are the formation of regulatory regions that allow the expression of the genes and the effects of the new genes in the organism as well. Herein, we discuss the current knowledge on the evolution of novel functional genes, and we examine in more detail the youngest genes discovered.