Webb Miller

PurposeThe goal of this study was to utilize quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) to identify field collected ticks and determine the prevalence of thirteen tickborne pathogens.Methods & MaterialsTicks were collected by drag/flag sampling from seven west Michigan counties. Ticks were found at 22 out of 35 total field sites. and were preliminarily identified by microscopy. Following transfer to the University of New England, total nucleic acids were extracted and quantified. Species-specific primers were developed targeting diverse regions of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase B (CytB) gene for Ixodes scapularis, I. cookei, I. pacificus, Amblyomma americanum, A. maculatum, Ripicephalus sanguineus, Dermacentor andersoni, and D. variabilis. Previously described primer sets were synthesized to detect the presence of Bourbon virus, Heartland virus, Powasson virus, Babesia microti, Borrelia miyamotoi, B …

In this Article, we reported genome sequencing data from five Sumatran and five Bornean orang-utans. In re-analysing these data, Banes et al. 1 found that eight of the ten samples were mislabelled, and we wish to correct the original publication according to their findings. In addition, Banes et al. 1 find that one of the orang-utans that we had labelled as a male Sumatran is in fact a female Tapanuli orang-utan (an orang-utan species that was unknown at the time of publication of our original Article and that was first reported in 2017 (ref. 2)). While we here correct the original tables to display the correct names and IDs of the individuals studied, we do not correct the analyses in the original paper since the Tapanuli species was discovered only after we had concluded our study. We refer the reader to Banes et al. 1 for further information. In the main text, the sentence “We also sequenced the genomes of 10 additional …

Standardized identification of genotypes is necessary in animals that reproduce asexually and form large clonal populations such as coral. We developed a high-resolution hybridization-based genotype array coupled with an analysis workflow and database for the most speciose genus of coral, Acropora, and their symbionts. We designed the array to co-analyze host and symbionts based on bi-allelic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) markers identified from genomic data of the two Caribbean Acropora species as well as their dominant dinoflagellate symbiont, Symbiodinium ‘fitti’. SNPs were selected to resolve multi-locus genotypes of host (called genets) and symbionts (called strains), distinguish host populations and determine ancestry of coral hybrids between Caribbean acroporids. Pacific acroporids can also be genotyped using a subset of the SNP loci and additional markers enable the detection of …

No endemic Madagascar animal with body mass >10 kg survived a relatively recent wave of extinction on the island. From morphological and isotopic analyses of skeletal “subfossil” remains we can reconstruct some of the biology and behavioral ecology of giant lemurs (primates; up to ∼160 kg) and other extraordinary Malagasy megafauna that survived into the past millennium. Yet, much about the evolutionary biology of these now-extinct species remains unknown, along with persistent phylogenetic uncertainty in some cases. Thankfully, despite the challenges of DNA preservation in tropical and subtropical environments, technical advances have enabled the recovery of ancient DNA from some Malagasy subfossil specimens. Here, we present a nuclear genome sequence (∼2× coverage) for one of the largest extinct lemurs, the koala lemur Megaladapis edwardsi (∼85 kg). To support the testing of key …

Woolly mammoths were among the most abundant cold-adapted species during the Pleistocene. Their once-large populations went extinct in two waves, an end-Pleistocene extinction of continental populations followed by the mid-Holocene extinction of relict populations on St. Paul Island ∼5,600 years ago and Wrangel Island ∼4,000 years ago. Wrangel Island mammoths experienced an episode of rapid demographic decline coincident with their isolation, leading to a small population, reduced genetic diversity, and the fixation of putatively deleterious alleles, but the functional consequences of these processes are unclear. Here, we show that a Wrangel Island mammoth genome had many putative deleterious mutations that are predicted to cause diverse behavioral and developmental defects. Resurrection and functional characterization of several genes from the Wrangel Island mammoth carrying …