Stanley Moldawsky (1925-2018).

Presents an obituary for Stanley Moldawsky, who passed away on February 9, 2018. Moldawsky was a retired clinical psychologist and an adjunct visiting professor at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP) at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. With several close colleagues, he was not only instrumental in establishing the GSAPP but was also tenacious in working to obtain state approval and an academic home for their collaborative aspiration.

Divergent lactate dehydrogenase isoenzyme profile in cellular compartments of primate forebrain structures.

The compartmentalization and association of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) with specific cellular structures (e.g., synaptosomal, sarcoplasmic or mitochondrial) may play an important role in brain energy metabolism.

Synaptosomal lactate dehydrogenase isoenzyme composition is shifted toward aerobic forms in primate brain evolution.

With the evolution of a relatively large brain size in haplorhine primates (i.e. tarsiers, monkeys, apes, and humans), there have been associated changes in the molecular machinery that delivers energy to the neocortex.

Developmental changes in the transcriptome of human cerebral cortex tissue: long noncoding RNA transcripts.

The human neocortex is characterized by protracted developmental intervals of synaptogenesis and myelination, which allow for an extended period of learning. The molecular basis of these and other postnatal developmental changes in the human cerebral cortex remain incompletely understood. Recently, a new large class of mammalian genes, encoding nonmessenger, long nonprotein-coding ribonucleic acid (lncRNA) molecules has been discovered.

Dynamic gene expression in the human cerebral cortex distinguishes children from adults.

In comparison with other primate species, humans have an extended juvenile period during which the brain is more plastic. In the current study we sought to examine gene expression in the cerebral cortex during development in the context of this adaptive plasticity. We introduce an approach designed to discriminate genes with variable as opposed to uniform patterns of gene expression and found that greater inter-individual variance is observed among children than among adults.

Elephant transcriptome provides insights into the evolution of eutherian placentation.

The chorioallantoic placenta connects mother and fetus in eutherian pregnancies. In order to understand the evolution of the placenta and provide further understanding of placenta biology, we sequenced the transcriptome of a term placenta of an African elephant (Loxodonta africana) and compared these data with RNA sequence and microarray data from other eutherian placentas including human, mouse, and cow. We characterized the composition of 55,910 expressed sequence tag (i.

Silencing, positive selection and parallel evolution: busy history of primate cytochromes C.

Cytochrome c (cyt c) participates in two crucial cellular processes, energy production and apoptosis, and unsurprisingly is a highly conserved protein. However, previous studies have reported for the primate lineage (i) loss of the paralogous testis isoform, (ii) an acceleration and then a deceleration of the amino acid replacement rate of the cyt c somatic isoform, and (iii) atypical biochemical behavior of human cyt c. To gain insight into the cause of these major evolutionary events, we have retraced the history of cyt c loci among primates.

Colloquium paper: phylogenomic evidence of adaptive evolution in the ancestry of humans.

In Charles Darwin's tree model for life's evolution, natural selection adaptively modifies newly arisen species as they branch apart from their common ancestor. In accord with this Darwinian concept, the phylogenomic approach to elucidating adaptive evolution in genes and genomes in the ancestry of modern humans requires a well supported and well sampled phylogeny that accurately places humans and other primates and mammals with respect to one another. For more than a century, first from the comparative immunological work of Nuttall on blood sera and now from comparative genomic studies, molecular findings have demonstrated the close kinship of humans to chimpanzees.

Phylogenomic analyses reveal convergent patterns of adaptive evolution in elephant and human ancestries.

Specific sets of brain-expressed genes, such as aerobic energy metabolism genes, evolved adaptively in the ancestry of humans and may have evolved adaptively in the ancestry of other large-brained mammals. The recent addition of genomes from two afrotherians (elephant and tenrec) to the expanding set of publically available sequenced mammalian genomes provided an opportunity to test this hypothesis. Elephants resemble humans by having large brains and long life spans; tenrecs, in contrast, have small brains and short life spans.

A primate subfamily of galectins expressed at the maternal-fetal interface that promote immune cell death.

Galectins are proteins that regulate immune responses through the recognition of cell-surface glycans. We present evidence that 16 human galectin genes are expressed at the maternal-fetal interface and demonstrate that a cluster of 5 galectin genes on human chromosome 19 emerged during primate evolution as a result of duplication and rearrangement of genes and pseudogenes via a birth and death process primarily mediated by transposable long interspersed nuclear elements (LINEs). Genes in the cluster are found only in anthropoids, a group of primate species that differ from their strepsirrhine counterparts by having relatively large brains and long gestations.

The human progesterone receptor shows evidence of adaptive evolution associated with its ability to act as a transcription factor.

The gene encoding the progesterone receptor (PGR) acts as a transcription factor, and participates in the regulation of reproductive processes including menstruation, implantation, pregnancy maintenance, parturition, mammary development, and lactation. Unlike other mammals, primates do not exhibit progesterone withdrawal at the time of parturition. Because progesterone-mediated reproductive features vary among mammals, PGR is an attractive candidate gene for studies of adaptive evolution.

Distinct genomic signatures of adaptation in pre- and postnatal environments during human evolution.

The human genome evolution project seeks to reveal the genetic underpinnings of key phenotypic features that are distinctive of humans, such as a greatly enlarged cerebral cortex, slow development, and long life spans. This project has focused predominantly on genotypic changes during the 6-million-year descent from the last common ancestor (LCA) of humans and chimpanzees. Here, we argue that adaptive genotypic changes during earlier periods of evolutionary history also helped shape the distinctive human phenotype.

Molecular evolution of the cytochrome c oxidase subunit 5A gene in primates.

Background: Many electron transport chain (ETC) genes show accelerated rates of nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions in anthropoid primate lineages, yet in non-anthropoid lineages the ETC proteins are typically highly conserved. Here, we test the hypothesis that COX5A, the ETC gene that encodes cytochrome c oxidase subunit 5A, shows a pattern of anthropoid-specific adaptive evolution, and investigate the distribution of this protein in catarrhine brains.

Results: In a dataset comprising 29 vertebrate taxa, including representatives from all major groups of primates, there is nearly 100% conservation of the COX5A amino acid sequence among extant, non-anthropoid placental mammals.

OCPAT: an online codon-preserved alignment tool for evolutionary genomic analysis of protein coding sequences.

Background: Rapidly accumulating genome sequence data from multiple species offer powerful opportunities for the detection of DNA sequence evolution. Phylogenetic tree construction and codon-based tests for natural selection are the prevailing tools used to detect functionally important evolutionary change in protein coding sequences. These analyses often require multiple DNA sequence alignments that maintain the correct reading frame for each collection of putative orthologous sequences.

Genomics, biogeography, and the diversification of placental mammals.

Previous molecular analyses of mammalian evolutionary relationships involving a wide range of placental mammalian taxa have been restricted in size from one to two dozen gene loci and have not decisively resolved the basal branching order within Placentalia. Here, on extracting from thousands of gene loci both their coding nucleotide sequences and translated amino acid sequences, we attempt to resolve key uncertainties about the ancient branching pattern of crown placental mammals. Focusing on approximately 1,700 conserved gene loci, those that have the more slowly evolving coding sequences, and using maximum-likelihood, Bayesian inference, maximum parsimony, and neighbor-joining (NJ) phylogenetic tree reconstruction methods, we find from almost all results that a clade (the southern Atlantogenata) composed of Afrotheria and Xenarthra is the sister group of all other (the northern Boreoeutheria) crown placental mammals, among boreoeutherians Rodentia groups with Lagomorpha, and the resultant Glires is close to Primates.

Functionally important glycosyltransferase gain and loss during catarrhine primate emergence.

A glycosyltransferase, alpha1,3galactosyltransferase, catalyzes the terminal step in biosynthesis of Galalpha1,3Galbeta1-4GlcNAc-R (alphaGal), an oligosaccharide cell surface epitope. This epitope or antigenically similar epitopes are widely distributed among the different forms of life. Although abundant in most mammals, alphaGal is not normally found in catarrhine primates (Old World monkeys and apes, including humans), all of which produce anti-alphaGal antibodies from infancy onward.

Evolution of increased glia-neuron ratios in the human frontal cortex.

Evidence from comparative studies of gene expression and evolution suggest that human neocortical neurons may be characterized by unusually high levels of energy metabolism. The current study examined whether there is a disproportionate increase in glial cell density in the human frontal cortex in comparison with other anthropoid primate species (New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, and hominoids) to support greater metabolic demands. Among 18 species of anthropoids, humans displayed the greatest departure from allometric scaling expectations for the density of glia relative to neurons in layer II/III of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (area 9L).

Phylogenetic relationships and divergence times among New World monkeys (Platyrrhini, Primates).

Orthologous sequences of six nuclear genes were obtained for all recognized genera of New World monkeys (Primates: Platyrrhini) and outgroups to evaluate the phylogenetic relationships and to estimate divergence times. Phylogenetic relationships were reconstructed by maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian approaches. All methods resolved with 100% branch support genus-level relationships, except for the grouping of Aotus as a sister taxa of Cebus and Saimiri, which was supported by low bootstrap percentages and posterior probability.

Evolution of the mammalian placenta revealed by phylogenetic analysis.

The placenta is essential for the success of therian mammalian reproduction. Intense selective pressure has shaped changes in placental anatomy and function during mammalian cladogenesis. Here we challenge the view that the hemochorial placenta is a derived feature in haplorhine primates.

Phylogenetic comparisons suggest that distance from the locus control region guides developmental expression of primate beta-type globin genes.

Phylogenetic inferences drawn from comparative data on mammalian beta-globin gene clusters indicate that the ancestral primate cluster contained a locus control region (LCR) and five paralogously related beta-type globin loci (5'-LCR-epsilon-gamma-psieta-delta-beta-3'), with epsilon and gamma expressed solely during embryonic life. A gamma locus tandem duplication (5'-gamma(1)-gamma(2)-3') triggered gamma's evolution toward fetal expression but by a different trajectory in platyrrhines (New World monkeys) than in catarrhines (Old World monkeys and apes, including humans). In platyrrhine (e.