Endogenous Retroviruses in Domestic Animals

Abstract

Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are genomic elements that are present in a wide range of vertebrates. Although the study of ERVs has been carried out mainly in humans and model organisms, recently, domestic animals have become important, and some species have begun to be analyzed to gain further insight into ERVs. Due to the availability of complete genomes and the development of new computer tools, ERVs can now be analyzed from a genome-wide viewpoint. In addition, more experimental work is being carried out to analyze the distribution, expression and interplay of ERVs within a host genome. Cats, cattle, chicken, dogs, horses, pigs and sheep have been scrutinized in this manner, all of which are interesting species in health and economic terms. Furthermore, several studies have noted differences in the number of endogenous retroviruses and in the variability of these elements among different breeds, as well as their expression in different tissues and the effects of their locations, which, in some cases, are near genes. These findings suggest a complex, intriguing relationship between ERVs and host genomes. In this review, we summarize the most important in silico and experimental findings, discuss their implications and attempt to predict future directions for the study of these genomic elements.

Boosting Organic Photovoltaic Performance Over 11% Efficiency With Photoconductive Fullerene Interfacial Modifier

“…The model includes a series resistance (R s ), recombination resistance (R rec ), the chemical capacitance (C u ) due to contact and wires, and an additional subcircuit connected in series with resistance (R hf ), and a capacitance (C hf ) in parallel. [43] The simulation results present that when using OPCBM layer the R s of device is significantly decreased from 4.2 to 1.1 V cm 2 , C u is increased from 49 to 80 nF cm À2 , which agree with the decreasing R s and reverse saturation current density (J s ) extracted from J-V curves as in Figure S7. This result supports that conclusion that the charge extraction in OPCBM based device is more efficient than those unmodified ones.…”

“…It is important to note that the V fb is high sensitivity on the fullerene coverage of the contact surface, where V fb corresponds to the intercept with the voltage axis. [43,49] Thus, from C À2 -V plot, we can find that the V fb in OPCB modified devices are higher than that of pristine ZnO x Table 2. Fitting parameters of IS characteristics based on an equivalent circuit and calculated density of surface states D S and effective electron life time t. device, which shows that better contact interface in OPCBM modified devices than that of the control device.…”

“…[7,25,31] It is known that the impedance spectroscopy (IS) experiments can distinguish internal processes of OPVs by analyzing their response to the applied alternating current (AC) signal. [43] Therefore, to probe the dynamics of charge collection and recombination at the ZnO x /OPCBM interface, we measured the IS characteristics for OPVs with different interlayers, and the Cole-Cole plots of corresponding devices under 1 sun illumination at 0.75 V are shown in Figure 5c. Also, we applied simulation and fitting to the experimental data by using the equivalent circuit model in Figure S6 and fitting parameters summarized in Table 2.…”

Domain Distribution of Mobile Genetic Elements in the Bovine Genome

“…A large amount of data has been accumulated, indicating that retrotranspositions in mammals are involved in the occurring of new genes and functional evolution [12], as well as in gene duplications [13]. Endogenous retroviruses (ERV) containing long terminal repeats (LTR) are another variant of RTs which is widespread in mammalian genomes (in particular, in bovine cattle) and characterized by high polymorphism; interbreed differences are described by the presence of some of them [14].…”

Charge Accumulation Spectroscopy for Investigating Organic Photovoltaic Stability

“…[10] In addition to transient techniques, frequency-modulated methods such as electromodulation spectroscopy, electroabsorption spectroscopy, and impedance spectroscopy have been successfully applied to investigate resistive and capacitive processes taking place in operating devices. [11,12] Extensive research addressing operational stability and sensitivity to some of the atmospheric components has led to a remarkable improvement in device lifetimes from seconds and minutes to many thousands of hours when operated in ambient air. [13] The best device lifetimes have been achieved by using the inverted architecture in which semiconductor metal oxides are used as electron and hole transport layers.…”