IMAGE:Nodes represent animal holdings and links represent cattle movements. Top white circles (left and center) map the contact networks in the past and allow the identification of loyal nodes (grey... view more Credit: Valdano et al. Research publishing this week in PLOS Computational Biology analyses the livestock trade in Italy and sexual encounters in a Brazilian prostitution service to find a correlation between loyalty and infection risk. The French team at Inserm, in collaboration with ISI Foundation and Istituto Zooprofilattico Abruzzo-Molise in Italy, has shown that it is possible to use past contact data to predict the risk of infection in emerging outbreaks. The study analyzes contact data between animal premises in Italy following livestock trade movements, and time-stamped sexual encounters in a high-end prostitution service in Brazil. The first is relevant for the spread of livestock diseases, and the second underlies the potential spread of sexually transmitted diseases. By introducing a measure of loyalty in the way farmers or prostitution clients tend to establish their contacts with the same individuals over time (for livestock trade or sexual behavior), the authors uncovered a significant correlation between the loyalty of an individual and his/her risk of infection. Contact patterns for disease … Continue reading →

Many animals, including humans, acquired essential 'foreign' genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times, according to research published in the open-access journal Genome Biology Many animals, including humans, acquired essential 'foreign' genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times, according to research published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study challenges conventional views that animal evolution relies solely on genes passed down through ancestral lines, suggesting that, at least in some lineages, the process is still ongoing. The transfer of genes between organisms living in the same environment is known as horizontal gene transfer (HGT). It is well known in single-celled organisms and thought to be an important process that explains how quickly bacteria evolve, for example, resistance to antibiotics. HGT is thought to play an important role in the evolution of some animals, including nematode worms which have acquired genes from microorganisms and plants, and some beetles that gained bacterial genes to produce enzymes for digesting coffee berries. However, the idea that HGT occurs in more complex animals, such as humans, rather than them solely gaining genes directly from ancestors, has been widely debated and contested. Lead author Alastair Crisp from the University of … Continue reading →

Many of us are walking around all the time in a fog caused by "social jetlag." That's what happens when we lose sleep because our daily schedules don't match our bodies' natural rhythms. The condition can be a particular problem for shift workers, who work into the night or on a shifting schedule. Now, researchers report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on March 12 that sleep and workers' general wellbeing could be improved if work schedules took workers' biological clocks into account. "A 'simple' re-organization of shifts according to chronotype allowed workers to sleep more on workday nights," says Till Roenneberg of Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Germany. "As a consequence, they were also able to sleep less on their free days due to a decreased need for compensating an accumulating sleep loss. This is a double-win situation." Such a change might have other long-term health implications, too, although that remains to be seen. An earlier report by Roenneberg's team, also in Current Biology, showed a link between social jetlag and obesity, along with other unhealthy habits, including smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol and caffeine (see http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/cp-sji050412.php). The researchers got the chance to implement their ideas about sleep and work schedules … Continue reading →