Publications by authors named "Vanessa Barber"
Article Synopsis
- Angiosperms are vital for ecosystems and human life, making it important to understand their evolutionary history to grasp their ecological dominance.
- The study builds an extensive tree of life for about 8,000 angiosperm genera using 353 nuclear genes, significantly increasing the sampling size and refining earlier classifications.
- The findings reveal a complex evolutionary history marked by high gene tree conflict and rapid diversification, particularly during the early angiosperm evolution, with shifts in diversification rates linked to global temperature changes.
Article Synopsis
- The tree of life serves as a biological map for understanding evolution and the characteristics of life on Earth, particularly focusing on flowering plants (angiosperms) which have many data gaps despite their importance.
- The article presents a phylogenomic platform utilizing high-throughput sequencing tools and 353 nuclear genes to deepen the exploration of the angiosperm tree of life, with methods, data release, and an open data portal called the Kew Tree of Life Explorer.
- The first data release includes the largest nuclear phylogenomic dataset for angiosperms to date, covering a vast number of samples and families, and provides a "first pass" tree that supports current taxonomy while questioning previously established relationships among plant orders.
The world's herbaria collectively house millions of diverse plant specimens, including endangered or extinct species and type specimens. Unlocking genetic data from the typically highly degraded DNA obtained from herbarium specimens was difficult until the arrival of high-throughput sequencing approaches, which can be applied to low quantities of severely fragmented DNA. Target enrichment involves using short molecular probes that hybridise and capture genomic regions of interest for high-throughput sequencing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health Sarcopenia Project developed data-driven cut-points for clinically meaningful weakness and low lean body mass. This analysis describes strength and function response to interventions based on these classifications.
Methods: In data from four intervention studies, 378 postmenopausal women with baseline and 6-month data were evaluated for change in grip strength, appendicular lean mass corrected for body mass index, leg strength and power, and short physical performance battery (SPPB).
Hepatocytes play a central and crucial role in cholesterol and lipid homeostasis, and their proper function is of key importance for cardiovascular health. In particular, hepatocytes (especially periportal hepatocytes) endogenously synthesize large amounts of cholesterol and secrete it into circulating blood via apolipoprotein particles. Cholesterol-secreting hepatocytes are also the clinically-relevant cells targeted by statin treatment in vivo.
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