We examined the polymorphisms in the PIT1 gene of 103 pigs and compared their frequencies in the maternal and paternal lineages of the Pietrain and Large White breeds, which have undergone divergent selection for over 30 years. DNA samples extracted from the blood of these animals were amplified by PCR and genotyped by RFLP, using the restriction enzyme RsaI. The data were analyzed with the chi...

BACKGROUND Whereas weight or height at a given age are the results of the cumulative growth experience, growth velocities allows the study of factors affecting growth at given ages. AIM To study the relationships between parental height and body mass index (BMI) and offspring's height and weight growth during infancy and childhood. STUDY DESIGN From the FLVSII population-based study, 235 pa...

Allotype suppression is a unique example in higher organisms of the regulation of gene expression by antibodies directed against the product of those genes. Both in rabbits and mice, prenatal and/or early postnatal exposure to anti-immunoglobulin allotype antibody suppresses production of the allotype in animals genetically capable of producing it. However, the long-lived or "chronic" suppressi...

Mitochondria are inherited maternally in most animals, but the mechanisms of selective paternal mitochondrial elimination (PME) are unknown. While examining fertilization in Caenorhabditis elegans, we observed that paternal mitochondria rapidly lose their inner membrane integrity. CPS-6, a mitochondrial endonuclease G, serves as a paternal mitochondrial factor that is critical for PME. We found...

Widespread evidence exists that when relatives live together, kinship plays a central role in shaping the evolution of social behaviour. Previous studies showed that female rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) recognize familiar maternal kin using vocal cues. Recognizing paternal kin might, however, be more difficult as rhesus females mate promiscuously during the possible conception period, most p...

Evidence for paternal kin recognition and paternally biased behaviors is mixed among primates. We investigate whether infant handling behaviors exhibit paternal kin biases in wild white-faced capuchins monkeys (Cebus capucinus) by comparing interactions between infants and genetic sires, potential sires, siblings (full sibling, maternal, and paternal half-siblings) and unrelated handlers. We us...

After being paired with females, male prairie voles show major changes in their social behaviors among which is an increase in paternal responsiveness. These changes are accompanied by fluctuations in the density of the [Arg8]vasopressin-immunoreactive (AVP-ir) fibers in the lateral septum, suggesting that septal AVP might be involved in these changes. To explore a possible involvement of septa...

OBJECTIVE To discuss the recent literature on paternal obesity, focusing on the possible mechanisms of transmission of the phenotypes from the father to the children. SOURCES A non-systematic review in the PubMed database found few publications in which paternal obesity was implicated in the adverse transmission of characteristics to offspring. Specific articles on epigenetics were also evalu...

the present study describes approaches for the identification of individual beech trees using maternal tissues from their seeds or fruits. four microsatellite markers were used for genetic analysis of seedlots from fagus orientalis lipsky, a highly out-crossing tree species. seeds from 11 single-tree harvests belonging to one population, (7 seeds from each), as well as non-paranchymatic materna...

A whole-genome scan using an affected paternal half-sib design was utilized to detect quantitative trait loci (QTL) for left-sided displaced abomasum (LDA) in German Holsteins. A total of 360 animals from 14 paternal half-sib families were genotyped, for a total of 306 polymorphic microsatellites. For a whole-genome scan, 221 markers were equally distributed over all 29 bovine autosomes, with a...