Ecological and anthropogenic effects on the genomic diversity of lemurs in Madagascar.

Ecological variation and anthropogenic landscape modification have had key roles in the diversification and extinction of mammals in Madagascar. Lemurs represent a radiation with more than 100 species, constituting roughly one-fifth of the primate order. Almost all species of lemurs are threatened with extinction, but little is known about their genetic diversity and demographic history.

Screening great ape museum specimens for DNA viruses.

Natural history museum collections harbour a record of wild species from the past centuries, providing a unique opportunity to study animals as well as their infectious agents. Thousands of great ape specimens are kept in these collections, and could become an important resource for studying the evolution of DNA viruses. Their genetic material is likely to be preserved in dry museum specimens, as reported previously for monkeypox virus genomes from historical orangutan specimens.

Early Unguided Human Brain Organoid Neurovascular Niche Modeling into the Permissive Chick Embryo Chorioallantoic Membrane.

Engrafting organoids into vascularized tissues in model animals, such as the immunodeficient mouse or chick embryo chorioallantoic membrane (CAM), has proven efficient for neovascularization modeling. The CAM is a richly vascularized extraembryonic membrane, which shows limited immunoreactivity, thus becoming an excellent hosting model for human origin cell transplants. This paper describes the strategy to engraft human brain organoids differentiated at multiple maturation stages into the CAM.

Multiple social identities and well-being: Insights from a person-centred approach.

Recent research on social identity and identity integration suggests that individuals who have multiple identities and who also successfully integrate them are better adjusted. We combine predictions from these studies and examine how social identification, together with identity integration, are related to psychological well-being using a person-centred approach. A first study (N = 2705) showed that the identity configuration characterized by high levels of identification with organization and gender, as well as the perception that these identities are well integrated, is associated with the highest level of well-being.

Complex Evolutionary History With Extensive Ancestral Gene Flow in an African Primate Radiation.

Understanding the drivers of speciation is fundamental in evolutionary biology, and recent studies highlight hybridization as an important evolutionary force. Using whole-genome sequencing data from 22 species of guenons (tribe Cercopithecini), one of the world's largest primate radiations, we show that rampant gene flow characterizes their evolutionary history and identify ancient hybridization across deeply divergent lineages that differ in ecology, morphology, and karyotypes. Some hybridization events resulted in mitochondrial introgression between distant lineages, likely facilitated by cointrogression of coadapted nuclear variants.

CAAStools: a toolbox to identify and test Convergent Amino Acid Substitutions.

Motivation: Coincidence of Convergent Amino Acid Substitutions (CAAS) with phenotypic convergences allow pinpointing genes and even individual mutations that are likely to be associated with trait variation within their phylogenetic context. Such findings can provide useful insights into the genetic architecture of complex phenotypes.

Results: Here we introduce CAAStools, a set of bioinformatics tools to identify and validate CAAS in orthologous protein alignments for predefined groups of species representing the phenotypic values targeted by the user.

A global catalog of whole-genome diversity from 233 primate species.

The rich diversity of morphology and behavior displayed across primate species provides an informative context in which to study the impact of genomic diversity on fundamental biological processes. Analysis of that diversity provides insight into long-standing questions in evolutionary and conservation biology and is urgent given severe threats these species are facing. Here, we present high-coverage whole-genome data from 233 primate species representing 86% of genera and all 16 families.

The landscape of tolerated genetic variation in humans and primates.

Unlabelled: Personalized genome sequencing has revealed millions of genetic differences between individuals, but our understanding of their clinical relevance remains largely incomplete. To systematically decipher the effects of human genetic variants, we obtained whole genome sequencing data for 809 individuals from 233 primate species, and identified 4.3 million common protein-altering variants with orthologs in human.

The Predictive Value of Non-Referential Beat Gestures: Early Use in Parent-Child Interactions Predicts Narrative Abilities at 5 Years of Age.

A longitudinal study with 45 children (Hispanic, 13%; non-Hispanic, 87%) investigated whether the early production of non-referential beat and flip gestures, as opposed to referential iconic gestures, in parent-child naturalistic interactions from 14 to 58 months old predicts narrative abilities at age 5. Results revealed that only non-referential beats significantly (p < .01) predicted later narrative productions.

Inversions and genomic differentiation after secondary contact: When drift contributes to maintenance, not loss, of differentiation.

Due to their effects on reducing recombination, chromosomal inversions may play an important role in speciation by establishing and/or maintaining linked blocks of genes causing reproductive isolation (RI) between populations. This view fits empirical data indicating that inversions typically harbor loci involved in RI. However, previous computer simulations of infinite populations with two to four loci involved in RI implied that, even with gene flux as low as 10 per gamete, per generation between alternative arrangements, inversions may not have large, qualitative advantages over collinear regions in maintaining population differentiation after secondary contact.

The Convergence Between Cultural Psychology and Developmental Science: Acculturation as an Exemplar.

The present article proposes an integration between cultural psychology and developmental science. Such an integration would draw on the cultural-psychology principle of culture-psyche interactions, as well as on the developmental-science principle of person↔context relations. Our proposed integration centers on acculturation, which is inherently both cultural and developmental.

Biculturalism dynamics: A daily diary study of bicultural identity and psychosocial functioning.

We examined two conceptualizations of bicultural identity - the Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) framework (cultural identity blendedness-distance and harmony-conflict) and cultural hybridizing and alternating (mixing one's two cultural identities and/or switching between them). Utilizing data from a 12-day diary study with 873 Hispanic college students, we examined three research questions: (1) cross-sectional and longitudinal inter-correlations among these biculturalism components, (2) links among daily variability in these biculturalism components, and (3) how this daily variability predicts well-being and mental health outcomes over time. Bicultural hybridizing was positively related to, and longitudinally predicted by, both BII blendedness and harmony.

Finding words and word structure in artificial speech: the development of infants' sensitivity to morphosyntactic regularities.

To achieve language proficiency, infants must find the building blocks of speech and master the rules governing their legal combinations. However, these problems are linked: words are also built according to rules. Here, we explored early morphosyntactic sensitivity by testing when and how infants could find either words or within-word structure in artificial speech snippets embodying properties of morphological constructions.

Sequential memory: a putative neural and synaptic dynamical mechanism.

A key issue in the neurophysiology of cognition is the problem of sequential learning. Sequential learning refers to the ability to encode and represent the temporal order of discrete elements occurring in a sequence. We show that the short-term memory for a sequence of items can be implemented in an autoassociation neural network.

"What" and "where" in visual working memory: a computational neurodynamical perspective for integrating FMRI and single-neuron data.

Single-neuron recordings, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, and the effects of lesions indicate that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is involved in some types of working memory and related cognitive processes. Based on these data, two different models of the topographical and functional organization of the PFC have been proposed: organization-by-stimulus-domain, and organization-by-process. In this article, we utilize an integrate-and-fire network to model both single-neuron and fMRI data on short-term memory in order to understand data obtained in topologically different parts of the PFC during working memory tasks.