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Marek’s disease vaccine research funded at Pirbright

The Pirbright Institute has recently been awarded joint funding with The Roslin Institute to research how the deadly Marek’s disease virus (MDV) causes tumours in poultry, and create a more effective vaccine. MDV is highly contagious and is a major threat to the poultry…

Antibody

Position and function of goat antibody genes identified at Pirbright

The Immunogenetics Group at The Pirbright Institute has identified the position and function of specific genes in the goat’s genetic code that are responsible for antibody production. Up until now, identifying and characterising the genes related to the immune system of…

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Rapid lineage assignment for the influenza A internal genes

The hemagglutinin subtypes from Influenza A can be divided into distinct lineages. This is important for tracing the evolutionary history of the gene. It allows regional lineages to be identified and studied. The process of lineage identification depends on phylogenetic…

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Adaptation to divergent larval diets in the medfly, Ceratitis capitata

Variation in diet can influence the timing of major life-history events and can drive population diversification and ultimately speciation. Proximate responses of life histories to diet have been well studied. However, there are scant experimental data on how organisms adapt…

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Vertically transmitted rhabdoviruses are found across three insect families and have dynamic interactions with their hosts

A small number of free-living viruses have been found to be obligately vertically transmitted, but it remains uncertain how widespread vertically transmitted viruses are and how quickly they can spread through host populations. Recent metagenomic studies have found several…

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Evolutionary biology and genetic techniques for insect control

The requirement to develop new techniques for insect control that minimize negative environmental impacts has never been more pressing. Here we discuss population suppression and population replacement technologies. These include sterile insect technique, genetic elimination…

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Variation in adult sex ratio alters the association between courtship, mating frequency and paternity in the lek-forming fruitfly Ceratitis capitata

The intensity with which males deliver courtship and the frequency with which they mate are key components of male reproductive success. However, we expect the strength of the relationship between these traits and a male's overall paternity to be strongly context dependent…

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Rapid and simple detection of foot-and-mouth disease virus: Evaluation of a cartridge-based molecular detection system for use in basic laboratories

Highly contagious transboundary animal diseases such as foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) are major threats to the productivity of farm animals. To limit the impact of outbreaks and to take efficient steps towards a timely control and eradication of the disease, rapid and…

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Inferring within-herd transmission parameters for African swine fever virus using mortality data from outbreaks in the Russian Federation

Mortality data are routinely collected for many livestock and poultry species, and they are often used for epidemiological purposes, including estimating transmission parameters. In this study, we infer transmission rates for African swine fever virus (ASFV), an important…

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A 3-way hybrid approach to generate a new high quality chimpanzee reference genome (Pan_tro_3.0)

The chimpanzee is arguably the most important species for the study of human origins. A key resource for these studies is a high quality reference genome assembly, however, as most mammalian genomes, the current iteration of the chimpanzee reference genome assembly it is…