Chimpanzee populations living in relatively close proximity are substantially more different genetically than humans living on different continents, according to a study published today in PLoS Genetics. The study suggests that genomics can provide a valuable new tool for use in chimpanzee conservation, with the potential to identify the population of origin of an individual chimpanzee or the provenance of a sample of bush meat.
Common chimpanzees in equatorial Africa have long been recognized as falling into three distinct populations, or sub-species: western, central and eastern chimpanzees. A fourth group, the Cameroonian chimpanzee, has been proposed to live in southern Nigeria and western Cameroon, but there has been considerable controversy as to whether it constitutes a distinct group.
Scientists from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Broad Institute, the Centre Pasteur du Cameroun and the Biomedical Primate Research Centre examined DNA from 54 chimpanzees, measuring the DNA at 818 positions across the genome that varied between individuals. Analysis of patterns in the data showed Cameroonian chimpanzees to be distinct from the other, well-established groups. Intriguingly, previous conclusions based on earlier studies, that Cameroonian and western chimpanzees were most closely related, were shown to be untrue; instead the closest relationships to Cameroonian chimpanzees are with nearby central chimpanzees.
Dr Rory Bowden from the University of Oxford, who led the study, said: "These findings have important consequences for conservation. All great ape populations face unparalleled challenges from habitat loss, hunting and emerging infections, and conservation strategies need to be based on sound understanding of the underlying population structure. The fact that all four recognized populations of chimpanzees are genetically distinct emphasizes the value of conserving them independently.
"Genomics can also provide tools for use in chimpanzee conservation. Genetic tests could cheaply and easily identify the population of origin of an individual chimpanzee or even a sample of bush meat."
The authors also contrasted the levels of genetic differentiation between the chimpanzees from the different groups with those based on similar data from humans from different populations. Surprisingly, even though all the chimpanzee populations lived in relatively close proximity, with the habitats of two groups separated only by a river, chimpanzees from different populations were substantially more different genetically than humans living on different continents.
Professor Peter Donnelly, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford and a senior author on the study, said: "Relatively small numbers of humans left Africa 50,000-100,000 years ago. All non-African populations descended from them, and are reasonably similar genetically. That chimpanzees from habitats in the same country, separated only by a river, are more distinct than humans from different continents is really interesting. It speaks to the great genetic similarities between human populations, and to much more stability, and less interbreeding, over hundreds of thousands of years, in the chimpanzee groups."
The conservation implications of the study extend to other species. New techniques such as next-generation sequencing, which have become available since the study was initiated, will allow a catalogue of genetic variation to be obtained cheaply and easily for any species, simply by sequencing even one or two individuals. Such a catalogue could then be used to perform a study like this one, to identify genetically distinct groups, and subsequently to develop simple and cheap tests of population of origin.
Dr Nick Mundy, from the University of Cambridge, and the paper's other senior author, said: "Because they are humans' nearest relatives, the structure and origins of chimpanzee populations have long been of wide interest. Future studies will be able to use genome data to uncover the adaptations that are unique to the Cameroonian chimpanzees."
###
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Nearby chimpanzee populations show much greater genetic diversity than distant human populationsPublic release date: 2-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Chimpanzee populations living in relatively close proximity are substantially more different genetically than humans living on different continents, according to a study published today in PLoS Genetics. The study suggests that genomics can provide a valuable new tool for use in chimpanzee conservation, with the potential to identify the population of origin of an individual chimpanzee or the provenance of a sample of bush meat.
Common chimpanzees in equatorial Africa have long been recognized as falling into three distinct populations, or sub-species: western, central and eastern chimpanzees. A fourth group, the Cameroonian chimpanzee, has been proposed to live in southern Nigeria and western Cameroon, but there has been considerable controversy as to whether it constitutes a distinct group.
Scientists from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Broad Institute, the Centre Pasteur du Cameroun and the Biomedical Primate Research Centre examined DNA from 54 chimpanzees, measuring the DNA at 818 positions across the genome that varied between individuals. Analysis of patterns in the data showed Cameroonian chimpanzees to be distinct from the other, well-established groups. Intriguingly, previous conclusions based on earlier studies, that Cameroonian and western chimpanzees were most closely related, were shown to be untrue; instead the closest relationships to Cameroonian chimpanzees are with nearby central chimpanzees.
Dr Rory Bowden from the University of Oxford, who led the study, said: "These findings have important consequences for conservation. All great ape populations face unparalleled challenges from habitat loss, hunting and emerging infections, and conservation strategies need to be based on sound understanding of the underlying population structure. The fact that all four recognized populations of chimpanzees are genetically distinct emphasizes the value of conserving them independently.
"Genomics can also provide tools for use in chimpanzee conservation. Genetic tests could cheaply and easily identify the population of origin of an individual chimpanzee or even a sample of bush meat."
The authors also contrasted the levels of genetic differentiation between the chimpanzees from the different groups with those based on similar data from humans from different populations. Surprisingly, even though all the chimpanzee populations lived in relatively close proximity, with the habitats of two groups separated only by a river, chimpanzees from different populations were substantially more different genetically than humans living on different continents.
Professor Peter Donnelly, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford and a senior author on the study, said: "Relatively small numbers of humans left Africa 50,000-100,000 years ago. All non-African populations descended from them, and are reasonably similar genetically. That chimpanzees from habitats in the same country, separated only by a river, are more distinct than humans from different continents is really interesting. It speaks to the great genetic similarities between human populations, and to much more stability, and less interbreeding, over hundreds of thousands of years, in the chimpanzee groups."
The conservation implications of the study extend to other species. New techniques such as next-generation sequencing, which have become available since the study was initiated, will allow a catalogue of genetic variation to be obtained cheaply and easily for any species, simply by sequencing even one or two individuals. Such a catalogue could then be used to perform a study like this one, to identify genetically distinct groups, and subsequently to develop simple and cheap tests of population of origin.
Dr Nick Mundy, from the University of Cambridge, and the paper's other senior author, said: "Because they are humans' nearest relatives, the structure and origins of chimpanzee populations have long been of wide interest. Future studies will be able to use genome data to uncover the adaptations that are unique to the Cameroonian chimpanzees."
###
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
There are many important actions to take to ensure your success in stock market investing ? researching companies, following trends, being patient, and many others. If you want to make money trading, read this article for excellent tips! You can start to earn profits from the stock market today. commission avalanche
Consider signing up for an online investing message board. Using this type of community forum, you can communicate with other investors and talk about a variety of financial issues and decisions. You can offer help and insight to others, and they can offer the same to you. You may learn things that are not mentioned in technical books and in investment courses.
Satisfactory portfolios return about 8%, but 15% or 20% is not unheard of. You can do even better with the right selections. Your knowledgable and sound choices in building your investment portfolio, combined with solid diversification and discipline, can achieve positive results.
dan kennedy renegade millionaire If you are comfortable doing your own research, consider using an online broker. The fees charged by full service brokers are steep. Online brokers charge a fraction of that, but you will be essentially on your own. You want to spend the least amount of money in order to make money.
Have you considered online stock trading? Stock trading firms can be found online, which are a lot more affordable than typical brokerage firms. Do your homework to get the best rate. TradeKing and Fidelity are two trusted online brokerage firms.
dan kennedy Understand that you will be pleasantly surprised on many occasions. Unfortunately this holds true for negative news about company. This stability, or lack of it, is one of the most important things to look for before choosing to invest in a particular company?s stock. Remember that events are connected and that patterns will keep on repeating themselves.
Try to purchase stocks that will do better than average. Average is typically defined as 10% annually. The growth rate of projected earnings added to the yield of the dividend will give you a good indication of what your likely return will be. A stock whose earnings are growing at 12% that also yields 2% in dividends offers you a potential return of 14%, for example.
Try to maintain a realistic perspective when you invest in the stock market. If you hope for double-digit returns every year, you are almost certainly going to be disappointed. Keep expectations reasonable, and increase your goals slowly.
When it comes to investing in the stock market, success rarely comes overnight. It can take awhile before some companies show any change in their stocks; thus, difficulty sets in for awhile before you can make any profit. Patience is a good thing, and that goes for investing, as well.
Don?t invest in a company until you?ve researched it. People are often too quick to decide that a new company is a good investment after reading about it?s existence. If the company fails to perform to expectations, stockholders are left taking the loss.
What?s the relationship between equity and voting rights of a particular company? Sometimes, in a bear market, a cyclical stock will underperform because of macro-economic conditions. Avoid buying stock in companies with these types of situations.
While anyone can invest, few have the correct research and information that can help them earn better profits. Focus on your education and how the market works, and make a calculated decision before buying. Get your investment project started today, and keep this article?s suggestions in mind.
I try to avoid talking to my gadgets, but something about the Wacom Intuos5 made me want to shower it with praise?as soon as I removed it from its box?several weeks ago. It was slender, felt reassuringly solid?and it would accept input from a?stylus as well as from my own fingers. Beauty and brains.
The Intuos5 is?a graphics tablet, an input device which allows you to use a pen-like stylus to draw and write as you would on paper.?It is smackdab in the center of Wacom's product offerings: More capable than the entry-level Bamboo line, but significantly simpler (and lower priced) than the?Cintiq 24HD.
The Intuos5 uses?Wacom's proprietary?digital pen technology. Because of this technology, the included stylus registers 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity and up to 60 degrees of pen tilt? which means that the tablet will be able to detect even the slightest changes in pen angle and pressure.?Unlike prior Intuos models, the Intuos5 also offers multi-touch support, meaning that you can use your good ol' fingers and all sorts of customizable gestures to zoom, scroll, pan, or rotate content???or to match certain operating system or application shortcuts.
There are also customizable ExpressKeys and a Touch Ring on the Intuos5. These features will allow you to program shortcuts and speed up your workflow.?You won't ever need to actually look down at the tablet to see which of these special keys you're touching though, because a new heads-up display feature makes?the?layout flash across the screen?if you rest your finger on a key.
Here's how that looks in action:
Now that the features and specifications are out of the way, let's?get to the real issue though: How does the Intuos5 fare in the real world?
From my experience, quite well.
While I'm most definitely not a skilled artist of any sort?? unless stick figures count?? I have handled so many stylus and multi-touch based devices that I've come to understand what works and what doesn't. And the Intuos5 works. It's responsive, accurate and intuitive. (I did experience some jitteriness with the multi-touch gestures initially, but a reinstall of Wacom's drivers fixed those issues.)
Multi-touch gestures are assigned using Wacom's software, so you don't have to wait around for a developer to bring the functionality to your favorite application. The same applies to the heads-up display and pen settings as well.
The Intuos5 does what it's made to do?? nothing more and nothing less?? but?it does it well. The only pesky thing about the device is its propensity to attract dust bunnies as if it is an electronic carrot of some sort.?That's one of the downfalls of the (rather comfortable) matte rubber coating which has replaced the glossy finish found on prior Intuos models.
If you're looking to pick up a graphics tablet, the Intuos5 would serve you well. It is pricier than the devices in the Bamboo line, but it also offers more control and precision. And if its lifespan is anything like that of prior Intuos models, you'll get plenty of use out of it. (I own an Intuos3 which is as great now as it was when I first purchased it half a decade ago.)
The Intuos5 is available in three sizes???small, medium and large???and they are priced at $230, $350 and $470, respectively.?An optional accessory kit which will allow you to covert the device into a wireless tablet is also available. It is priced at $40 and includes a rechargeable battery, a module that fits inside the tablet and a USB receiver. All of these products can be ordered through Wacom's website.
Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts, or circling her?on?Google+.
The ECLAP 2012 conference is open to researchers, professionals, industries, institutions, technicians and practitioners in the area of performing arts and information technologies, media entertainment, technology enhanced learning, intelligent media systems, acoustic systems, cultural heritage, and many others.
The ECLAP conference should become a place where institutions, industries and European Commission and Europeana projects in the areas of cultural heritage can collaborate and present results. It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts have also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas.
For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 Conference can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is a European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT. The ECLAP 2012 conference is going to have a general track and a set of workshops/sections and panels, and excellent keynote speakers. The conference will be constituted by selected top level papers, which will be published in the proceedings pressed by Florence University Press, with ISBN, and promoted in the most relevant indexing engines.
Topics of the General track on Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment, but not limited to, are: ? Indexing and search, filtering, information retrieval ? Cross media and multimedia mining ? Media Annotations and tagging, solutions and interfaces ? Mobile solutions and tools ? Cloud based mobile solutions ? Creative technologies ? Sentiment analysis ? Multimodal interactive systems ? Recommendations and suggestions ? Media grid processing and semantic computing ? IPR management and business models ? Data and media protection ? Linked Open Data and Media, aggregated media ? Intelligent information management ? Personalization and profiling, user behavior analysis ? Live Performance technologies and solutions ? Emotion recognition and exploitation ? Audio processing and tools for large events and installations ? Video analysis, indexing and summarization ? Social media technologies and solutions ? Story telling models and tools ? 3D and 4D technologies and tools ? Brain interfaces and interactions ? Collective intelligence analysis and exploitation ? Augmented reality solutions ? Multilingual and natural language processing ? Collaborative and cooperative systems ? Metadata quality, mapping and ingestion models and tools ? Speech processing and understanding ? Content production models and tools
?
REGISTRATION FORM AND FURTHER INFORMATION: http://www.eclap.eu/drupal/?q=node/65281
For other info: info@eclap.eu
?
?
Cultural Heritage and Information Technologies. Museum as an information system The 13th IASTED International Conference on Computer Graphics and Imaging ?How I learned to stop listening and love the noise? Digital horizons for archaeology and research Perseus Digital Library for Humanities, and more Indiana US, art teachers and art students Digital Cultural Heritage: European targets Online speaking dictionaries for preservation LINKED OPEN DATA means sharing knowledge Ladies and gentlemen, Benoit Paill?. Israel Invests in Digitizing Museums? Collections More than interactivity, it?s Public Art Sign after the X Maurice Benayoun @ Streaming Museum NYC Do you like skinny Venus?? ISRAEL MUSEUMS GOING DIGITAL High resolution 3D digital imaging in China World Library and Information Congress: 78th IFLA General Conference and Assembly Watermans International Festival of Digital Art Tennis + digital technologies: tie-break! Collaborative Conference on 3D Research (CC3DR) 2012 DIGITAL CREATING Norway: exploring new paths for ancient books Websites as sources: How should humanities and social sciences approach, use and diffuse publicly available online sources? DIGITAL KILLED THE FILM? DIGITAL MEETS HERITAGE David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture DAVID HOCKNEY: A PAINTER ENJOYING NEW TECHNOLOGIES Zimbabwe for the visually impaired students New Workshop of Creating Interactive Applications at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague IFBOOKTHEN 2012 International conference Preserving the web evolution: AUSTRALIA?S PANDORA DIGITAL MEETS ART WJ-SPOTS BRUXELLES just closed! Tyrant Penteus face to face to digital tools DISH ? The conference about digital strategies for heritage ?12 HOURS, 4 THEMES, 1 PASSION, 14 CITIES? Tokyo: from Florence with love Transmedia Bridge ? European Cinema & Audiovisual Days Ispiring creativity is our mission Performing Arts Digital Collections: ECLAP. Opportunities, Advantages, Experiences Advanced Digital Preservation 10th Art: The Lion King powered by 3D Photo Vernissage 2011, Saint Petersburg : ?Melody and Passion of Mediterranean Italy, Spain? Japan Media Art Festival: Dortmund 2011
[unable to retrieve full-text content]AP - A woman accused of running her 9-year-old granddaughter to death as punishment for eating chocolate was captured on a school bus videotape saying she planned to run the child "'til she can't run no more," a prosecutor told a judge Thursday in announcing capital murder charges.
Live Dial in Number: 1-877-407-4018 or 1-201-689-8471 Replay Dial in Number: 1-877-870-5176 & 1-858-384-5517 Passcode: 387279 A telephone replay of the conference call will be available through March 14th, 2012