Plant reoviruses are able to multiply in gramineae plants and delphacid vectors encountering different defense strategies with unique features. This study aims to comparatively assess alterations of small RNA (sRNA) populations in both hosts upon virus infection. For this purpose, we characterized the sRNA profiles of wheat and planthopper vectors infected by Mal de Río Cuarto virus (MRCV, Fiji...

DNA methylation is a key epigenetic mark that is critical for gene regulation in multicellular eukaryotes. Although various human cell types may have the same genome, these cells have different methylomes. The systematic identification and characterization of methylation marks across cell types are crucial to understand the complex regulatory network for cell fate determination. In this study, ...

Digestion of purified reovirus with chymotrypsin in the presence of 0.15 M NaCl converts virions to infectious subviral particles (SVP(i)). The SVP(i) have an active ribonucleic acid (RNA) polymerase and are similar in composition to the partially uncoated virions which have been isolated from infected L cells. SVP(i) have a buoyant density of 1.40 g/ml in CsCl and sediment at 420S as compared ...

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is an important food crop for humanity, being cultivated in tropical and temperate regions of the world. This study reports nearly complete genome sequences four Brazilian rice stripe necrosis virus (RSNV) isolates. The nucleotide RNA1 RNA2 segments these isolates were 96.5 to 99.9% identical, indicating their close phylogenetic relationship each other. Phylogeny recombin...

We analyze the sharing of very short identity by descent (IBD) segments between humans, Neandertals, and Denisovans to gain new insights into their demographic history. Short IBD segments convey information about events far back in time because the shorter IBD segments are, the older they are assumed to be. The identification of short IBD segments becomes possible through next generation sequen...

End-to-end chromosome fusions that occur in the context of telomerase deficiency can trigger genomic duplications. For more than 70 years, these duplications have been attributed solely to breakage-fusion-bridge cycles. To test this hypothesis, we examined end-to-end fusions isolated from Caenorhabditis elegans telomere replication mutants. Genome-level rearrangements revealed fused chromosome ...

We report on the isolation of a novel fusogenic orthoreovirus from bat flies (Eucampsipoda africana) associated with Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) collected in South Africa. Complete sequences of the ten dsRNA genome segments of the virus, tentatively named Mahlapitsi virus (MAHLV), were determined. Phylogenetic analysis places this virus into a distinct clade with Baboon orthoreo...

Autozygosity occurs when two chromosomal segments that are identical from a common ancestor are inherited from each parent. This occurs at high rates in the offspring of mates who are closely related (inbreeding), but also occurs at lower levels among the offspring of distantly related mates. Here, we use runs of homozygosity in genome-wide SNP data to estimate the proportion of the autosome th...

Human DNA shows a complex structure with compositional features at many scales; the isochores--long DNA segments (~10⁵ bp) of relatively homogeneous guanine-cytosine (G + C) content--are the largest well-documented and well-analyzed compositional structures. However, we report here on the existence of a high-level compositional organization of isochores in the human genome. By using a segmentat...

Comparing genomes is an essential preliminary step to solve many problems in biology. Matching long similar segments between two genomes is a precondition for their evolutionary, genetic, and genome rearrangement analyses. Though various comparison methods have been developed in recent years, a quantitative assessment of their performance is lacking. Here, we describe two families of assessment...