The identification of regions that have undergone selection is one of the principal goals of theoretical and applied evolutionary genetics. Such studies can also provide information about the evolutionary processes involved in shaping genomes, as well as physical and functional information about genes/genomic regions. Domestication followed by breed formation and selection schemes has allowed the formation of very diverse livestock breeds adapted to a wide variety of environments and with special characteristics. The advances in genomics in the last five years have enabled the development of several methods to detect selection signatures and have resulted in the publication of a considerable number of studies involving livestock species. The aims of this review are to describe the principal effects of natural/artificial selection on livestock genomes, to present the main methods used to detect selection signatures and to discuss some recent results in this area. This review should be useful also to research scientists working with wild animals/non-domesticated species and plant biologists working with breeding and evolutionary biology.
Genetic diversity is one of the most important issues in studies on conservation of cattle breeds and endangered species. The objective of this study was to estimate the levels of genetic differentiation between locally adapted taurine (Bos taurus taurus) and zebu (Bos taurus indicus) breeds in Brazil, which were genotyped for more than 777,000 SNPs. The fixation index (F ), principal component analysis (PCA), and Bayesian clustering were estimated. The F highlighted genetic differentiation between taurine and zebu breeds. The taurine lines, Caracu and Caracu Caldeano, had significant genetic differentiation (F close to 5%) despite their recent selection for different uses (meat and milk). This genetic variability can be used for conservation of locally adapted animals, as well as for breeding programs on zebu breeds. Introgression of zebu in locally adapted breeds was identified, especially in Curraleiro Pé-Duro breed. The Gyr breed, however, had low breed purity at genomic level due to its very heterogeneous mixing pattern.
The long-term performance and stability of Pseudomonas putida mt-2 cultures, a toluene-sensitive strain harboring the genes responsible for toluene biodegradation in the archetypal plasmid pWW0, was investigated in a chemostat bioreactor functioning under real case operating conditions. The process was operated at a dilution rate of 0.1 h(-1) under toluene loading rates of 259 +/- 23 and 801 +/- 78 g m(-3) h(-1) (inlet toluene concentrations of 3.5 and 10.9 g m(-3), respectively). Despite the deleterious effects of toluene and its degradation intermediates, the phenotype of this sensitive P. putida culture rapidly recovered from a 95% Tol(-) population at day 4 to approx. 100% Tol(+) cells from day 13 onward, sustaining elimination capacities of 232 +/- 10 g m(-3) h(-1) at 3.5 g Tol m(-3) and 377 +/- 13 g m(-3) h(-1) at 10.9 g Tol m(-3), which were comparable to those achieved by highly tolerant strains such as P. putida DOT T1E and P. putida F1 under identical experimental conditions. Only one type of Tol(-) variant, harboring a TOL-like plasmid with a 38.5 kb deletion (containing the upper and meta operons for toluene biodegradation), was identified.
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