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The Human Anatomy
Our bodies sure are complicated. Learn about the different parts of the body that make up the human anatomy and the internal systems that work to keep our bodies functioning with these fact-filled worksheets.Download All (22)
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Click on a worksheet in the set below to see more info or download the PDF.
Human Anatomy: KidneyDownload Worksheet More info
Did you know people can live with just one kidney? Get a head start on human anatomy with this info sheet on kidneys.
Human Anatomy: NoseDownload Worksheet More info
Did you know our sense of smell is also called "olfactory"? Learn about the structure and function of the nose with this human anatomy sheet.
Human Anatomy: BladderDownload Worksheet More info
Learn the basics of human anatomy with this info sheet all about the bladder. Your child will learn the different parts of the bladder
Human Anatomy: MusclesDownload Worksheet More info
Studying human anatomy? Here is a great sheet that shows a diagram of all the muscle system. Your child will learn the scientific terms of the major muscles.
Human Anatomy: ThyroidDownload Worksheet More info
Do you know what the thyroid does? Learn about our body's largest gland with this human anatomy info sheet.
Human Anatomy: EyeDownload Worksheet More info
Just like the rest of our body, our eyes are a complicated system! Learn about how the human eye works with this anatomy sheet.
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Human Anatomy: PancreasDownload Worksheet More info
If your child is starting to learn human biology, give him a great study sheet with this anatomy worksheet about the pancreas.
Human Anatomy: BrainDownload Worksheet More info
The brain is the most important organ in the human body. Get a basic grasp on the parts and functions of the brain with this anatomy info sheet.
Human Anatomy: EarDownload Worksheet More info
How does our hearing work? Give your child a great guide to the anatomy of our ears with this anatomy worksheet.
Human Anatomy: LiverDownload Worksheet More info
Learn all about the liver with this anatomy sheet. Our liver is one of many organs in the digestive system expelling waste from the body.
Human Anatomy: IntestinesDownload Worksheet More info
Read about the intestines, an important part of our digestive process. Your child will see a diagram of this body organ and learn important terms and concepts.
Human Anatomy: HeartDownload Worksheet More info
Ever wonder how the human body functions? Enjoy this great info sheet all about the human heart, one of our most important organs.
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Human Anatomy: StomachDownload Worksheet More info
How much does your child know about the structure of his stomach? Learn a bit about this important organ with an informative anatomy sheet!
Human Anatomy: TongueDownload Worksheet More info
How does our sense of taste function? Introduce your child to the anatomy of our tongue with this diagram and info sheet.
Human Anatomy: SkinDownload Worksheet More info
Did you know that our skin is actually an organ? In fact, it's the largest organ in our bodies! Learn about our skin with this anatomy sheet.
Human Anatomy: LungsDownload Worksheet More info
Learn all about how we breathe with this info sheet about lungs. Your child will learn the different parts of the lung, including terms and concepts.
Sense of TouchDownload Worksheet More info
Does your child know his five senses? Give him an introduction to human anatomy with this sense of touch worksheet.
Human Skeletal SystemDownload Worksheet More info
Did you know there are over 200 bones in the human body? Learn more about the human skeletal system with this diagram and info sheet!
Human Digestive System DiagramDownload Worksheet More info
Your young biologist can find out what happens when we eat by building this cool human digestive system diagram.
Human LungsDownload Worksheet More info
What makes for healthy lungs? Kids can use the labeled diagram of the human lung's different components to complete the word scramble at the bottom of the page.
Basic Human Anatomy: BloodDownload Worksheet More info
Use this "Basic Human Anatomy" sheet to see how blood carries nutrients through your body.
Human Body DiagramDownload Worksheet More info
For those of you studying human anatomy, here is a great diagram of the major organs in our body!
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Loved for its beauitful golden sand beach, the sunny town of Kaiteriteri is a launching place for trips into the Abel Tasman National Park.
This attractive beach town is 13 kilometres from Motueka and handy to the Abel Tasman National Park. Known for its beautiful golden sand (made of quartz and mica particles) and clear blue-green water, Kaiteriteri has a motor camp, motels, a general store and a choice of places to eat (check out the seafood). Local hikes include Withells Walk and Kaka Pah Point. From Kaiteriteri you can catch a water taxi or tour into the Abel Tasman National Park and hire some kayaks. It's often possible to rent a private beach house if you're planning to stay for more than a few days.

subset: commoncrawl


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Welcome to Brooklyn!
Whether you're a resident or a visitor, Brooklyn has something for everyone. We hope that you will use this website often to find up-to-date news and information on the happenings in town, to find answers to questions, to print useful forms and documents and to subscribe to the various Boards & Commissions' mailing lists. Please feel free to utilize the Contact Us link at the top of the page for comments and suggestions about the website or questions on town business.
Brooklyn was settled in the seventeenth century and incorporated in 1786. We are home to America's oldest continuously running agricultural fair, The Brooklyn Fair, which runs the weekend before Labor Day weekend every year. Brooklyn is also the final resting place of the Revolutionary War hero General Israel Putnam who was a prominent figure in the Battle of Bunker Hill and is famous for the quote, "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes."
With a population of about 8,200 residents, Brooklyn is nestled in the middle of the Last Green Valley and along the Route 169 National Scenic Byway. We are fortunate to have an excellent Elementary and Middle School, outstanding recreational facilities and beautiful scenery. We hope this website will be informative and resourceful to all residents and visitors.


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GCF and LCM Word Problems
Lesson 8 of 16
Objective: SWBAT: • Define LCM, and GCF • Solve word problems involving LCM and GCF.
Big Idea: When would you come across GCF and LCM? Students apply their knowledge of GCF and LCM to solve word problems.
Do Now
See my Do Now in my Strategy folder that explains my beginning of class routines.
Often, I create do nows that have problems that connect to the task that students will be working on that day. Here, students are reviewing factors, multiples, GCF, and LCM. A common mistake is students confuse GCF and LCM. I quickly go over correct answers with students.
Resources (2)
Resources (2)
I have students work in partners on these two problems. I don't mention anything about LCM and GCF. If students struggle, that's okay. I encourage them to use what they know to do something. Students will use different strategies to solve these problems, and that's great!
After about 10 minutes I have students go to the next page. Students participate in a Think Write Pair Share.
I want students to notice that problem 1 is asking for the smallest number of buns and hot dogs you need to buy if you want the same number of each. Some students will connect this to finding the LCM of 8 and 10. I want student to notice that problem 2 is splitting pearls and beads up into equal groups. The question is asking for the largest number of identical necklaces. Some students will connect this to GCF.
Resources (2)
Resources (2)
More Problems
I use the ticket to go data from the previous lesson (Multiples, LCM, and GCF) to create homogeneous groups for this part of the lesson. This way students can work with other students who are around their same skill level. I go over group expectations and pass out the Group Work Rubric. I have printed one set of GCF and LCM problem cards for each group. I cut them out and put them in an envelope. I explain that students will receive an envelope with the problems they will work on. See my Creating Homogeneous Groups and Using the Group Work Rubric videos in my Strategy Folder for more details.
As students are working I walk around to fill out rubrics and monitor student progress. I am looking to see what strategies students are using and how they are showing their work. Students are engaging with MP 1: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
If students struggle I may intervene in one of these ways:
- What is the problem asking?
- What do you know from the problem?
- What do you see going on in your head when you read this problem?
- How could you show what is going on in the problem?
- Look back at problem A and B. Is this problem similar to either of those problems? Why or why not?
- Offer the student(s) a multiplication chart or Factor reference sheet
I Post A Key around the room, so groups can check their answers as the complete them. If a group successfully completes the problems, they can work on the challenge problems.


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26 Nov 2013 14:01:26 PM
On Royston Wee's Signing and the Death of "UFC-Caliber" Fighters
(This is one of approximately 4 photos that exist of the most talented fighter in all of Singapore. According to the UFC, at least. Via Yahoo.)
Who is Royston Wee, you ask? Oh, he's just the first Singaporean fighter to ever sign a deal with the UFC is all. No big whoop. He's also undefeated, and has picked up every single one of his victories by way of first round submission.
The problem is, Royston holds just two professional fights to his credit, and they both took place back in 2011. Yet somehow, he, along with the slightly more experienced Filipino Dave Galera (5-0) and One FC veteran (and therefore, most experienced) Leandro Issa (11-3)*, recently secured a multi-fight deal with the UFC. In fact, Royston already has his first fight lined up — against Galera at Fight Night 34:Ellenberger vs. Saffiedine, which goes down in, you guessed it, Singapore, on January 4th.
Is Royston some Brock Lesnar-level star over in "The Lion City," you ask? Not exactly. He's just a 27 year-old bantamweight who was competing for a spot on TUF China last July like everyone else. The difference between Royston and his fellow potential castmates, however, is that Royston was able to convince whomever he was auditioning for — in a few short hours, no less — that he was not only TUF-caliber, but that he was UFC-caliber.
Is Royston simply that good? Here's the only video of him in action that we could find. We think it's from his last fight against Syed Shahir, who was making his pro debut at the time and has not fought since. Royston seems like a competent enough grappler, sure, but the caliber of his opponent speaks volumes more than that of his performance.
I keep using that word: caliber. It might be because that, for a time, there was a dubious distinction that came with having the letters "UFC" placed before it. It meant that you were proven. It meant that you were exceptional. But lo, it appears that the age when "UFC-caliber" actually meant something has passed us by.Read More DIGG THIS


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Featured News - Current News - Archived News - News Categories
Buffalo Niagara Sales and Marketing Executives will meet at 5 p.m. Monday, Sept. 16, at The Filling Station, 745 Seneca St., Buffalo. Kicking off the 2013-14 season, this casual open networking event in Larkinville is an opportunity to catch up with acquaintances, make new contacts and learn about the benefits of membership in the regional organization of sales and marketing executives.
Cost is $15 for members or $20 for non-members, and includes one drink ticket and hors d'oeuvres. Register by calling 76-662-2279 or online at www.bnsme.org. The normal $100 initiation fee will be waived for qualified new members who join SME at this event.
Parking is available at 716 Swan St., corner of Hagerman Street.
Since 1942, the Buffalo Niagara Sales and Marketing Executives group has been devoted to professionalism in sales and marketing. SME provides a unique forum for Greater Niagara business leaders to further their professional and personal development through interaction with experts in sales and marketing by sharing ideas, best practices, knowledge and experience.


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Monday , April 16, 2018 - 5:15 AM
OGDEN — As earlier envisioned, what's now Barker Park in North Ogden — the center of controversy stemming from a massive amphitheater taking shape there — was to have been a quiet place, where nature was the focus.
That meant no football, soccer or baseball fields, said John Hendrickson, North Ogden's city administrator from 1998 to 2002, alluding to the vision of Ray and Fern Barker, who sold the land to the city in 2000. The Barkers, Hendrickson said, hoped for a "passive type of a park."
Likewise, talk at the time of developing a small amphitheater as the park plans first took shape generated mixed sentiments.
"We were concerned even with that," Hendrickson recalled this week in 2nd District Court in Ogden, offering testimony at a hearing on the call by amphitheater foes for a halt to construction of the facility. "As I said before, because of sound, mainly because of sound."
Construction of the new amphitheater moves ahead, but that hasn't stopped the three couples living around Barker Park pushing for a stop to the work and removal of the upgrades completed thus far. They filed suit against the city of North Ogden in February, and Hendrickson took the stand on Wednesday in 2nd District Court in Ogden, called to bolster the contention that the amphitheater being built doesn't fit the original vision of the park.
North Ogden amphitheater upgrade begins, $1.85M first phase to be done by May
North Ogden amphitheater upgrade, 2 months on, spurs opposition campaign
North Ogden residents file suit to halt Barker Park amphitheater construction
North Ogden amphitheater lawsuit raises specter of having to tear out upgrades
A new subdivision was to have been developed adjacent to the land set aside for the planned park, Hendrickson testified, and one of the discussion points at the time was minimizing the possibility of disruptive activity. "We were concerned with the traffic. This was supposed to be a quiet park and a quiet subdivision," Hendrickson said.
Hendrickson was one of a handful witnesses who testified on behalf of the neighbors on Wednesday. Witnesses put forward by the city are to take the stand at the next court date, May 9, and Judge Noel Hyde, meantime, has yet to rule on the call for a temporary injunction halting work while the larger issues of their lawsuit are resolved.
Work on the upgraded amphitheater started last November, after the North Ogden City Council approved a $1.85 million contract with Wadman Corp. to handle the first phase of the project. Talk of augmenting the small, concrete-slab amphitheater that previously sat at the location dates to 2015 and city leaders discussed the plans on-and-off through 2017.
Nevertheless, as work unfolded late last year, the scope of the project took some of the neighbors by surprise — Aaron Christensen, wife Kim and others — leading to their lawsuit last February. They worry about noise, traffic and more brought on by the larger amphitheater and say its construction violates a 2000 warranty deed the city crafted with Ray and Fern Barker in connection with the city's purchase of the land.
The deed states that the park the city was to develop "will be a traditional type city park, and will be open to the public," and Hendrickson offered insight into the talks between the Barkers and city officials leading to the document's formulation.
The amphitheater, as envisioned in those early talks, called for a small "natural" facility, he said, "but not the place it is now." The stage pad would measure 10 feet by 16 feet, perhaps, and have no fixed seating or ticketing area.
Hendrickson has visited the site of the amphitheater taking shape, which would have a covered stage when complete, about 500 fixed seats and an enclosed area for dressing rooms, storage and more. "It was a whole lot different than what we ever envisioned, certainly more grandiose," he said.
Though the city's witnesses have yet to take the stand, Richard Reeve of Riverdale, representing the city, said the warranty deed in question is open to "numerous interpretations." He cited the city's investment in the amphitheater project thus far, around $1 million, and the fees of perhaps $20,000 a month the city would face if forced to bring work to a halt.
Moreover, Reeve pointed to the public process leading to the amphitheater project. The involvement of the Christensens and other neighbors now suing "was basically nonexistence" during much of that process, he said.
The current phase of amphitheater work is to be completed by mid-June, according to city officials.
Contact reporter Tim Vandenack at firstname.lastname@example.com, follow him on Twitter at @timvandenack or like him on Facebook at Facebook.com/timvandenackreporter.
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This design is modern, bold, and graceful all at once. The Charleston was a modern daring dance at the time, and this is like a new jazzy dance step. Email your photo to firstname.lastname@example.com at any time!
Regular Card Size: 5" x 7"
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You will receive your first electronic proof within 3-5 business days. If you need it faster, we offer a Rush Service Option—receive your digital proof in 1 business day!


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Or find a doctor at another Johns Hopkins Medicine Member Hospital:
Anne Marie O'Broin Lennon, M.B.B.Ch., M.D., Ph.D.
Clinical Director of Gastroenterology
Associate Professor of Medicine
Expertise: Endoscopic Ultrasound, Esophageal Cancer, Gastric Cancer, Gastroenterology, Pancreatic Cancer, Pancreatic Cysts, Von Hippel-Lindau (VHL)
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Dr. Anne Marie Lennon is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Lennon is the Director of the Multidisciplinary Pancreatic Cyst Clinic and an attending gastroenterologist at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. She received her medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1996. In addition, Dr. Lennon has obtained a Ph.D degree from The National University of Ireland. She completed an internal medicine residency in Dublin and at the Cleveland Clinic, followed by a Gastroenterology Fellowship in Edinburgh, Scotland. She then completed a two year Advanced Endoscopy Fellowship in endoscopic ultrasound and ERCP at Johns Hopkins. She is certified in General Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology by the Joint Royal Colleges of Physicians Training Board (JRCPTB) of the United Kingdom and is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. Dr. Lennon's major interests are the workup and management of patients with pancreatic cysts, pancreatic cancer or pre-cancerous lesions and the role of endoscopic ultrasound in the diagnosis of pre-cancerous and cancerous lesions.
- Clinical Director of Gastroenterology
- Director, Multidisciplinary Pancreatic Cyst Program
- Associate Professor of Medicine
- Associate Professor of Oncology
- Associate Professor of Radiology and Radiological Science
- Associate Professor of Surgery
- Associate Professor of Surgery
Departments / Divisions
- Medicine - Gastroenterology and Hepatology
- Oncology - Gastrointestinal Cancer
- Radiology and Radiological Science - Diagnostic Radiology
- Surgery - Ravitch Division of GI Surgery
- Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (1996)
- Cleveland Clinic / Internal Medicine (1999)
- Mater Misericordiae University Hospital (1999)
- St.Vincent's Hospital / Gastroenterology (2001)
- Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh / Gastroenterology (2008)
- Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine / Gastroenterology (2010)
Videos & Media
Symptoms You Shouldn't Ignore | A Woman's Journey
Recent News Articles and Media Coverage
Pancreatic Cyst Clinic Gathers World-Class Experts, Inside Tract (Fall, 2016)
Collaboration is an Anchor of Johns Hopkins Research, Inside Tract (Fall, 2016)
10 Cancer Symptoms You Can't Ignore
Finding and treating cancer at an early stage can save lives. In this recorded webinar, surgical oncologist Nita Ahuja and gastroenterologist Anne Marie Lennon discuss why symptoms such as bleeding, gastrointestinal issues and unexplained weight change may be cause for concern.


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Discuss Hungarian, Maryland, Dark Air cured, Perique, Rustica and any other unusual varieties here. If something gets a lot of attention, I'll give it a forum.
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Ireland holds public stocks and places no separate compulsory stock obligations on industry.
Since 1995, the responsibility for maintaining Ireland's compulsory stock obligations has rested with the National Oil Reserves Agency (NORA, which acts as an agent of the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. NORA holds compulsory strategic stocks, some of these in the form of tickets.
Oil companies that import oil or deliver products into the domestic market for consumption and large oil consumers are expected to hold "prudent" levels of operating stocks. However, these operators are not required to hold any compulsory stocks.
NORA may hold its stocks in either crude oil or products, or as a combination of both. NORA holds all compulsory stock obligations in the form of finished products across the three classification categories used by the European Union.
Emergency stocks can be held in Ireland and/or in EU member countries with which a bilateral oil stockholding agreement has been concluded. The Irish authorities do not impose any restrictions as regards to the location of emergency stocks stored abroad under bilateral agreements. Ireland has formal bilateral stockholding agreements with Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
There is a commitment to rebalance Ireland's strategic oil reserve by maximising the country's wholly owned stocks of oil and the level of stocks held in Ireland, subject to increased storage availability and value-for-money considerations. This strategy is outlined in the government white paper, Delivering a Sustainable Energy Future for Ireland, launched on 1 October 2006.
See also Closing Oil Stock Levels in days of Net Imports
Related news & events
- Energy ministers set course for new era at IEA
18 November 2015
- Review of Ireland's energy policies supports country's push for a low-carbon economy
11 July 2012
- Ireland plots path to a sustainable energy future
22 December 2011


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James DeYoung, Th.D.
Professor of New Testament Language and Literature
"…To lovingly communicate the knowledge of God and His will with correctness and confidence is essential in all we do."
- Th.D., Dallas Theological Seminary
- Th.M., Talbot Theological Seminary
- B.D., East Texas Baptist College
- B.A, Moody Bible Institute
Contact Information
Further Ministry Experience
James B. De Young is professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Western Seminary, Portland, OR, where he has taught since 1975. Prior to this he taught at Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland (now Multnomah University) from 1971 until 1975. He has a diploma from Moody Bible Institute (1962), a BA from East Texas Baptist University (1965), a BD (1968) and ThM (1969) from Talbot Theological Seminary, and a ThD (1973) from Dallas Theological Seminary. He has taught abroad (Holland, 1989) and traveled in Mexico (evangelism), Europe (outreach), and Afghanistan (outreach). Since 1971, he has attended Damascus Community Church, Damascus, Oregon, where he has been an elder and continues to teach adults. He has preached from various pulpits in the Northwest. He has served as chairman of the SaltShakers, a proactive community organization seeking to extend Christian values to the community of Portland. He has served as chairman of the Hermeneutics section within the Evangelical Theological Society since 1994. He has held conferences on critical issues including Islam and Christianity, universalism, and metaphors of the death of Christ. James was born in Illinois to a farming family. He met his wife in nearby Wisconsin and they were married in 1965. They have four married children, and ten grandchildren. He lives in the country where he has a mini farm and raises rhododendrons, Christmas trees, and beef cattle. They have two dogs, several cats, and four cows.
Recent Published Work
- Burning Down the Shack: How the "Christian" Bestseller Is Deceiving Millions (2010)
- Women in Ministry (2010)
- Terrorism, Islam, and Christian Hope Terrorism, Islam, and Christian Hope (2004)
- A SyntaxReader for the Greek New Testament (2002)
- Homosexuality: Contemporary Claims Examined in Light of the Bible and Other Ancient Literature and Law (2000)
- Beyond The Obvious: Discover the Deeper Meaning of Scripture (Co-authored with Sarah L. Hurty; 1995)


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☰ Menu
Joseph Felsenstein is Professor in the Departments of Genome Sciences and Biology and Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is best known for his work on phylogenetic inference, and is the author of Inferring Phylogenies, and principal author and distributor of the package of phylogenetic inference programs called PHYLIP, and is currently serving as the President of the Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution.
You can reach Joe at firstname.lastname@example.com
James McInerney is the principle investigator of the Bioinformatics and Molecular Evolution Laboratories at NUI Maynooth. He was one of the founding directors of the Irish Centre for High End Computing, an Associate Editor of Molecular Biology and Evolution, Biology Direct, and Journal of Experimental Zoology, and is currently serving as the Secretary for the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
You can reach James at firstname.lastname@example.com
Juliette de Meaux is interested in the molecular basis of Darwinian adaptation in natural plant systems. Her works combines the approaches of population, quantitative and molecular genetics to dissect the underpinning of adaptive changes. She completed her PhD at AgroParisTech, under the supervision of Prof. Claire Neema and studied the molecular basis of host-pathogen coevolution in natural populations of common bean. She then spent her Postdoc time in the lab of Prof. Tom Mitchell-Olds at the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology in Jena and worked on the evolution of cis-regulatory DNA. Since 2005, she runs her own lab, first at the Max Planck Institute of Plant Breeding in Cologne and then at the University of Münster. In January 2015, she relocated her lab at the University of Cologne. She is currently serving as the Treasurer for the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
You can reach Juliette at firstname.lastname@example.com
2019 Meeting in Manchester, England July 21-25
SMBE Council Members
The Walter Fitch Award
The Masatoshi Nei Lecture
Non-Members: You must Register for an account to purchase a membership and conduct other transactions. Future visits to the website will only require login.
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We are delighted to announce that the SMBE 2019 Meeting will be taking place in Manchester, United Kingdom. The Meeting will be held at the state of the art Manchester Central venue.
The programme will provide plenty of opportunities for you to submit your work for consideration as a symposium, oral or poster presentation.
Full details on registration fees, accommodation and exhibition opportunities will be made available in due course. Please do make a note of the key dates included below.
More information can be found HERE.
Leading the slate will be our new President-Elect, William F. Martin, currently Head of the Institut für Molekulare Evolution, Heinrich Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf. Many of you know Bill because he has served the Society in several capacities in the past, and is Editor-in-chief of Genome Biology and Evolution. After his one-year term as President-Elect, Bill will serve two more years as President and then Past-President.
David Pollock will be our new Secretary, and he will serve a three-year term. David is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Colorado.
One of our new Councillors will be Joanna Masel. Joanna is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.
Our other new Councillor will be Jay Storz. Jay is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska. Like all of the new officers, Jay will serve a three-year term.
Please join me both in congratulating each of these new officers and in thanking them for their willingness to serve the Society!
Best Regards,
George Zhang
President, SMBE
AbstractSome of the fastest evolving regions of the human genome are conserved noncoding elements with many human-specific DNA substitutions. These human accelerated regions (HARs) are enriched nearby regulatory genes, and several HARs function as developmental enhancers. To investigate if this evolutionary signature is unique to humans, we quantified evidence of accelerated substitutions in conserved genomic elements across multiple lineages and applied this approach simultaneously to the genomes of five apes: human, chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and gibbon. We find roughly similar numbers and genomic distributions of lineage-specific accelerated regions (linARs) in all five apes. In particular, apes share an enrichment of linARs in regulatory DNA nearby genes involved in development, especially transcription factors and other regulators. Many developmental loci harbor clusters of nonoverlapping linARs from multiple apes, suggesting that accelerated evolution in each species affected distinct regulatory elements that control a shared set of developmental pathways. Our statistical tests distinguish between GC-biased and unbiased accelerated substitution rates, allowing us to quantify the roles of different evolutionary forces in creating linARs. We find evidence of GC-biased gene conversion in each ape, but unbiased acceleration consistent with positive selection or loss of constraint is more common in all five lineages. It therefore appears that similar evolutionary processes created independent accelerated regions in the genomes of different apes, and that these lineage-specific changes to conserved noncoding sequences may have differentially altered expression of a core set of developmental genes across ape evolution.
AbstractModel organisms subjected to sustained experimental evolution often show levels of phenotypic differentiation that dramatically exceed the phenotypic differences observed in natural populations. Genome-wide sequencing of pooled populations then offers the opportunity to make inferences about the genes that are the cause of these phenotypic differences. We tested, through computer simulations, the efficacy of a statistical learning technique called the "fused lasso additive model" (FLAM). We focused on the ability of FLAM to distinguish between genes which are differentiated and directly affect a phenotype from differentiated genes which have no effect on the phenotype. FLAM can separate these two classes of genes even with relatively small samples (10 populations, in total). The efficacy of FLAM is improved with increased number of populations, reduced environmental phenotypic variation, and increased within-treatment among-replicate variation. FLAM was applied to SNP variation measured in both twenty-population and thirty-population studies of Drosophila subjected to selection for age-at-reproduction, to illustrate the application of the method.
AbstractMitochondrial DNA sequences are frequently transferred into the nuclear genome, giving rise to numts (nuclear mitochondrial DNA segments). In the absence of whole genomes, avian numts have been suggested to be rare and relatively short. We examined 64 bird genomes to test hypotheses regarding numt frequency, distribution among taxa, and likelihood of homoplasy. We discovered 100-fold variation in numt number across species. Two songbirds, Geospiza fortis (Darwin's finch) and Zonotrichia albicollis (white-throated sparrow) had the largest number of numts. Ancestral state reconstruction of 957 numt insertions in these two species and their close relatives indicated a remarkable acceleration of numt insertion in the ancestor of Geospiza and Zonotrichia followed by slower, continued accumulation in each lineage. These numts appear to result primarily from de novo insertion with the duplication of existing numts representing a secondary pathway. Insertion events were essentially homoplasy-free and numts appear to represent perfect rare genomic changes.
AbstractNoncoding DNA sequences, which play various roles in gene expression and regulation, are under evolutionary pressure. Gene regulation requires specific protein–DNA binding events, and our previous studies showed that both DNA sequence and shape readout are employed by transcription factors (TFs) to achieve DNA binding specificity. By investigating the shape-disrupting properties of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in human regulatory regions, we established a link between disruptive local DNA shape changes and loss of specific TF binding. Furthermore, we described cases where disease-associated SNPs may alter TF binding through DNA shape changes. This link led us to hypothesize that local DNA shape within and around TF binding sites is under selection pressure. To verify this hypothesis, we analyzed SNP data derived from 216 natural strains of Drosophila melanogaster. Comparing SNPs located in functional and nonfunctional regions within experimentally validated cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) from D. melanogaster that are active in the blastoderm stage of development, we found that SNPs within functional regions tended to cause smaller DNA shape variations. Furthermore, SNPs with higher minor allele frequency were more likely to result in smaller DNA shape variations. The same analysis based on a large number of SNPs in putative CRMs of the D. melanogaster genome derived from DNase I accessibility data confirmed these observations. Taken together, our results indicate that common SNPs in functional regions tend to maintain DNA shape, whereas shape-disrupting SNPs are more likely to be eliminated through purifying selection.
AbstractPopulation genomic data can be used to infer historical effective population sizes (Ne), which help study the impact of past climate changes on biodiversity. Previous genome sequencing of one individual of the common bottlenose dolphin Tursiops truncatus revealed an unusual, sharp rise in Ne during the last glacial, raising questions about the reliability, generality, underlying cause, and biological implication of this finding. Here we first verify this result by additional sampling of T. truncatus. We then sequence and analyze the genomes of its close relative, the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin T. aduncus. The two species exhibit contrasting demographic changes in the last glacial, likely through actual changes in population size and/or alterations in the level of gene flow among populations. Our findings suggest that even closely related species can have drastically different responses to climatic changes, making predicting the fate of individual species in the ongoing global warming a serious challenge.
AbstractThe human genome contains hundreds of thousands of missense mutations. However, only a handful of these variants are known to be adaptive, which implies that adaptation through protein sequence change is an extremely rare phenomenon in human evolution. Alternatively, existing methods may lack the power to pinpoint adaptive variation. We have developed and applied an Evolutionary Probability Approach (EPA) to discover candidate adaptive polymorphisms (CAPs) through the discordance between allelic evolutionary probabilities and their observed frequencies in human populations. EPA reveals thousands of missense CAPs, which suggest that a large number of previously optimal alleles experienced a reversal of fortune in the human lineage. We explored nonadaptive mechanisms to explain CAPs, including the effects of demography, mutation rate variability, and negative and positive selective pressures in modern humans. Many nonadaptive hypotheses were tested, but failed to explain the data, which suggests that a large proportion of CAP alleles have increased in frequency due to beneficial selection. This suggestion is supported by the fact that a vast majority of adaptive missense variants discovered previously in humans are CAPs, and hundreds of CAP alleles are protective in genotype–phenotype association data. Our integrated phylogenomic and population genetic EPA approach predicts the existence of thousands of nonneutral candidate variants in the human proteome. We expect this collection to be enriched in beneficial variation. The EPA approach can be applied to discover candidate adaptive variation in any protein, population, or species for which allele frequency data and reliable multispecies alignments are available.
AbstractGenomic data drive evolutionary research on the relationships and timescale of life but the genomes of most species remain poorly sampled. Phylogenetic trees can be reconstructed reliably using small data sets and the same has been assumed for the estimation of divergence time with molecular clocks. However, we show here that undersampling of molecular data results in a bias expressed as disproportionately shorter branch lengths and underestimated divergence times in the youngest nodes and branches, termed the small sample artifact. In turn, this leads to increasing speciation and diversification rates towards the present. Any evolutionary analyses derived from these biased branch lengths and speciation rates will be similarly biased. The widely used timetrees of the major species-rich studies of amphibians, birds, mammals, and squamate reptiles are all data-poor and show upswings in diversification rate, suggesting that their results were biased by undersampling. Our results show that greater sampling of genomes is needed for accurate time and rate estimation, which are basic data used in ecological and evolutionary research.
AbstractAlong with tRNAs, enzymes that modify anticodon bases are a key aspect of translation across the tree of life. tRNA modifications extend wobble pairing, allowing specific ("target") tRNAs to recognize multiple codons and cover for other ("nontarget") tRNAs, often improving translation efficiency and accuracy. However, the detailed evolutionary history and impact of tRNA modifying enzymes has not been analyzed. Using ancestral reconstruction of five tRNA modifications across 1093 bacteria, we show that most modifications were ancestral to eubacteria, but were repeatedly lost in many lineages. Most modification losses coincided with evolutionary shifts in nontarget tRNAs, often driven by increased bias in genomic GC and associated codon use, or by genome reduction. In turn, the loss of tRNA modifications stabilized otherwise highly dynamic tRNA gene repertoires. Our work thus traces the complex history of bacterial tRNA modifications, providing the first clear evidence for their role in the evolution of bacterial translation.
AbstractWe genotyped 738 individuals belonging to 49 populations from Nepal, Bhutan, North India, or Tibet at over 500,000 SNPs, and analyzed the genotypes in the context of available worldwide population data in order to investigate the demographic history of the region and the genetic adaptations to the harsh environment. The Himalayan populations resembled other South and East Asians, but in addition displayed their own specific ancestral component and showed strong population structure and genetic drift. We also found evidence for multiple admixture events involving Himalayan populations and South/East Asians between 200 and 2,000 years ago. In comparisons with available ancient genomes, the Himalayans, like other East and South Asian populations, showed similar genetic affinity to Eurasian hunter-gatherers (a 24,000-year-old Upper Palaeolithic Siberian), and the related Bronze Age Yamnaya. The high-altitude Himalayan populations all shared a specific ancestral component, suggesting that genetic adaptation to life at high altitude originated only once in this region and subsequently spread. Combining four approaches to identifying specific positively selected loci, we confirmed that the strongest signals of high-altitude adaptation were located near the Endothelial PAS domain-containing protein 1 and Egl-9 Family Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 loci, and discovered eight additional robust signals of high-altitude adaptation, five of which have strong biological functional links to such adaptation. In conclusion, the demographic history of Himalayan populations is complex, with strong local differentiation, reflecting both genetic and cultural factors; these populations also display evidence of multiple genetic adaptations to high-altitude environments.
AbstractDissecting the evolutionary genetic processes underlying eye reduction and vision loss in obligate cave-dwelling organisms has been a long-standing challenge in evolutionary biology. Independent vision loss events in related subterranean organisms can provide critical insight into these processes as well as into the nature of convergent loss of complex traits. Advances in evolutionary developmental biology have illuminated the significant role of heritable gene expression variation in the evolution of new forms. Here, we analyze gene expression variation in adult eye tissue across the freshwater crayfish, representing four independent vision-loss events in caves. Species and individual expression patterns cluster by eye function rather than phylogeny, suggesting convergence in transcriptome evolution in independently blind animals. However, this clustering is not greater than what is observed in surface species with conserved eye function after accounting for phylogenetic expectations. Modeling expression evolution suggests that there is a common increase in evolutionary rates in the blind lineages, consistent with a relaxation of selective constraint maintaining optimal expression levels. This is evidence for a repeated loss of expression constraint in the transcriptomes of blind animals and that convergence occurs via a similar trajectory through genetic drift.
AbstractAging is a complex process affecting different species and individuals in different ways. Comparing genetic variation across species with their aging phenotypes will help understanding the molecular basis of aging and longevity. Although most studies on aging have so far focused on short-lived model organisms, recent comparisons of genomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic data across lineages with different lifespans are unveiling molecular signatures associated with longevity. Here, we examine the relationship between genomic variation and maximum lifespan across primate species. We used two different approaches. First, we searched for parallel amino-acid mutations that co-occur with increases in longevity across the primate linage. Twenty-five such amino-acid variants were identified, several of which have been previously reported by studies with different experimental setups and in different model organisms. The genes harboring these mutations are mainly enriched in functional categories such as wound healing, blood coagulation, and cardiovascular disorders. We demonstrate that these pathways are highly enriched for pleiotropic effects, as predicted by the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of aging. A second approach was focused on changes in rates of protein evolution across the primate phylogeny. Using the phylogenetic generalized least squares, we show that some genes exhibit strong correlations between their evolutionary rates and longevity-associated traits. These include genes in the Sphingosine 1-phosphate pathway, PI3K signaling, and the Thrombin/protease-activated receptor pathway, among other cardiovascular processes. Together, these results shed light into human senescence patterns and underscore the power of comparative genomics to identify pathways related to aging and longevity.
AbstractRepeated evolutionary events imply underlying genetic constraints that can make evolutionary mechanisms predictable. Morphological traits are thought to evolve frequently through cis-regulatory changes because these mechanisms bypass constraints in pleiotropic genes that are reused during development. In contrast, the constraints acting on metabolic traits during evolution are less well studied. Here we show how a metabolic bottleneck gene has repeatedly adopted similar cis-regulatory solutions during evolution, likely due to its pleiotropic role integrating flux from multiple metabolic pathways. Specifically, the genes encoding phosphoglucomutase activity (PGM1/PGM2), which connect GALactose catabolism to glycolysis, have gained and lost direct regulation by the transcription factor Gal4 several times during yeast evolution. Through targeted mutations of predicted Gal4-binding sites in yeast genomes, we show this galactose-mediated regulation of PGM1/2 supports vigorous growth on galactose in multiple yeast species, including Saccharomyces uvarum and Lachancea kluyveri. Furthermore, the addition of galactose-inducible PGM1 alone is sufficient to improve the growth on galactose of multiple species that lack this regulation, including Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The strong association between regulation of PGM1/2 by Gal4 even enables remarkably accurate predictions of galactose growth phenotypes between closely related species. This repeated mode of evolution suggests that this specific cis-regulatory connection is a common way that diverse yeasts can govern flux through the pathway, likely due to the constraints imposed by this pleiotropic bottleneck gene. Since metabolic pathways are highly interconnected, we argue that cis-regulatory evolution might be widespread at pleiotropic genes that control metabolic bottlenecks and intersections.
AbstractWhile the natural history of flatfish has been debated for decades, the mode of diversification of this biologically and economically important group has never been elucidated. To address this question, we assembled the largest molecular data set to date, covering > 300 species (out of ca. 800 extant), from 13 of the 14 known families over nine genes, and employed relaxed molecular clocks to uncover their patterns of diversification. As the fossil record of flatfish is contentious, we used sister species distributed on both sides of the American continent to calibrate clock models based on the closure of the Central American Seaway (CAS), and on their current species range. We show that flatfish diversified in two bouts, as species that are today distributed around the equator diverged during the closure of CAS, whereas those with a northern range diverged after this, hereby suggesting the existence of a postCAS closure dispersal for these northern species, most likely along a trans-Arctic northern route, a hypothesis fully compatible with paleogeographic reconstructions.
AbstractThe Universal Gene Set of Life (UGSL) is common to genomes of all extant organisms. The UGSL is small, consisting of <100 genes, and is dominated by genes encoding the translation system. Here we extend the search for biological universality to three dimensions. We characterize and quantitate the universality of structure of macromolecules that are common to all of life. We determine that around 90% of prokaryotic ribosomal RNA (rRNA) forms a common core, which is the structural and functional foundation of rRNAs of all cytoplasmic ribosomes. We have established a database, which we call the Sparse and Efficient Representation of the Extant Biology (the SEREB database). This database contains complete and cross-validated rRNA sequences of species chosen, as far as possible, to sparsely and efficiently sample all known phyla. Atomic-resolution structures of ribosomes provide data for structural comparison and validation of sequence-based models. We developed a similarity statistic called pairing adjusted sequence entropy, which characterizes paired nucleotides by their adherence to covariation and unpaired nucleotides by conventional conservation of identity. For canonically paired nucleotides the unit of structure is the nucleotide pair. For unpaired nucleotides, the unit of structure is the nucleotide. By quantitatively defining the common core of rRNA, we systematize the conservation and divergence of the translational system across the tree of life, and can begin to understand the unique evolutionary pressures that cause its universality. We explore the relationship between ribosomal size and diversity, geological time, and organismal complexity.
AbstractUstilaginomycotina is home to a broad array of fungi including important plant pathogens collectively called smut fungi. Smuts are biotrophs that produce characteristic perennating propagules called teliospores, one of which, Ustilago maydis, is a model genetic organism. Broad exploration of smut biology has been hampered by limited phylogenetic resolution of Ustilaginiomycotina as well as an overall lack of genomic data for members of this subphylum. In this study, we sequenced eight Ustilaginomycotina genomes from previously unrepresented lineages, deciphered ordinal-level phylogenetic relationships for the subphylum, and performed comparative analyses. Unlike other Basidiomycota subphyla, all sampled Ustilaginomycotina genomes are relatively small and compact. Ancestral state reconstruction analyses indicate that teliospore formation was present at the origin of the subphylum. Divergence time estimation dates the divergence of most extant smut fungi after that of grasses (Poaceae). However, we found limited conservation of well-characterized genes related to smut pathogenesis from U. maydis, indicating dissimilar pathogenic mechanisms exist across other smut lineages. The genomes of Malasseziomycetes are highly diverged from the other sampled Ustilaginomycotina, likely due to their unique history as mammal-associated lipophilic yeasts. Despite extensive genomic data, the phylogenetic placement of this class remains ambiguous. Although the sampled Ustilaginomycotina members lack many core enzymes for plant cell wall decomposition and starch catabolism, we identified several novel carbohydrate active enzymes potentially related to pectin breakdown. Finally, ∼50% of Ustilaginomycotina species-specific genes are present in previously undersampled and rare lineages, highlighting the importance of exploring fungal diversity as a resource for novel gene discovery.
AbstractLipids are essential structural and functional components of cells. Little is known, however, about the evolution of lipid composition in different tissues. Here, we report a large-scale analysis of the lipidome evolution in six tissues of 32 species representing primates, rodents, and bats. While changes in genes' sequence and expression accumulate proportionally to the phylogenetic distances, <2% of the lipidome evolves this way. Yet, lipids constituting this 2% cluster in specific functions shared among all tissues. Among species, human show the largest amount of species-specific lipidome differences. Many of the uniquely human lipidome features localize in the brain cortex and cluster in specific pathways implicated in cognitive disorders.
AbstractPhenotypic plasticity results in a diversity of phenotypes from a single genotype in response to environmental cues. To understand the molecular basis of phenotypic plasticity, studies have focused on differential gene expression levels between environmentally determined phenotypes. The extent of alternative splicing differences among environmentally determined phenotypes has largely been understudied. Here, we study alternative splicing differences among plastically produced morphs of the pea aphid using RNA-sequence data. Pea aphids express two separate polyphenisms (plasticity with discrete phenotypes): a wing polyphenism consisting of winged and wingless females and a reproduction polyphenism consisting of asexual and sexual females. We find that pea aphids alternatively splice 34% of their genes, a high percentage for invertebrates. We also find that there is extensive use of differential spliced events between genetically identical, polyphenic females. These differentially spliced events are enriched for exon skipping and mutually exclusive exon events that maintain the open reading frame, suggesting that polyphenic morphs use alternative splicing to produce phenotype-biased proteins. Many genes that are differentially spliced between polyphenic morphs have putative functions associated with their respective phenotypes. We find that the majority of differentially spliced genes is not differentially expressed genes. Our results provide a rich candidate gene list for future functional studies that would not have been previously considered based solely on gene expression studies, such as ensconsin in the reproductive polyphenism, and CAKI in the wing polyphenism. Overall, this study suggests an important role for alternative splicing in the expression of environmentally determined phenotypes.
AbstractUnlike most crops, which were domesticated through long periods of selection by ancient humans, horticultural plants were primarily domesticated through intentional selection over short time periods. The molecular mechanisms underlying the origin and spread of novel traits in the domestication process have remained largely unexplored in horticultural plants. Gloxinia (Sinningia speciosa), whose attractive peloric flowers influenced the thoughts of Darwin, have been cultivated since the early 19th century, but its origin and genetic basis are currently unknown. By employing multiple experimental approaches including genetic analysis, genotype–phenotype associations, gene expression analysis, and functional interrogations, we showed that a single gene encoding a TCP protein, SsCYC, controls both floral orientation and zygomorphy in gloxinia. We revealed that a causal mutation responsible for the development of peloric gloxinia lies in a 10-bp deletion in the coding sequence of SsCYC. By combining genetic inference and literature searches, we have traced the putative ancestor and reconstructed the domestication path of the peloric gloxinia, in which a 10-bp deletion in SsCYC under selection triggered its evolution from the wild progenitor. The results presented here suggest that a simple genetic change in a pleiotropic gene can promote the elaboration of floral organs under intensive selection pressure.
AbstractHorizontal gene transfer (HGT) can equip organisms with novel genes, expanding the repertoire of genetic material available for evolutionary innovation and allowing recipient lineages to colonize new environments. However, few studies have characterized the functions of HGT genes experimentally or examined postacquisition functional divergence. Here, we report the use of ancestral sequence reconstruction and heterologous expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae to examine the evolutionary history of an oomycete transporter gene family that was horizontally acquired from fungi. We demonstrate that the inferred ancestral oomycete HGT transporter proteins and their extant descendants transport dicarboxylic acids which are intermediates of the tricarboxylic acid cycle. The substrate specificity profile of the most ancestral protein has largely been retained throughout the radiation of oomycetes, including in both plant and animal pathogens and in a free-living saprotroph, indicating that the ancestral HGT transporter function has been maintained by selection across a range of different lifestyles. No evidence of neofunctionalization in terms of substrate specificity was detected for different HGT transporter paralogues which have different patterns of temporal expression. However, a striking expansion of substrate range was observed for one plant pathogenic oomycete, with a HGT derived paralogue from Pythium aphanidermatum encoding a protein that enables tricarboxylic acid uptake in addition to dicarboxylic acid uptake. This demonstrates that HGT acquisitions can provide functional additions to the recipient proteome as well as the foundation material for the evolution of expanded protein functions.
AbstractRed algae (Rhodophyta) underwent two phases of large-scale genome reduction during their early evolution. The red seaweeds did not attain genome sizes or gene inventories typical of other multicellular eukaryotes. We generated a high-quality 92.1 Mb draft genome assembly from the red seaweed Gracilariopsis chorda, including methylation and small (s)RNA data. We analyzed these and other Archaeplastida genomes to address three questions: 1) What is the role of repeats and transposable elements (TEs) in explaining Rhodophyta genome size variation, 2) what is the history of genome duplication and gene family expansion/reduction in these taxa, and 3) is there evidence for TE suppression in red algae? We find that the number of predicted genes in red algae is relatively small (4,803–13,125 genes), particularly when compared with land plants, with no evidence of polyploidization. Genome size variation is primarily explained by TE expansion with the red seaweeds having the largest genomes. Long terminal repeat elements and DNA repeats are the major contributors to genome size growth. About 8.3% of the G. chorda genome undergoes cytosine methylation among gene bodies, promoters, and TEs, and 71.5% of TEs contain methylated-DNA with 57% of these regions associated with sRNAs. These latter results suggest a role for TE-associated sRNAs in RNA-dependent DNA methylation to facilitate silencing. We postulate that the evolution of genome size in red algae is the result of the combined action of TE spread and the concomitant emergence of its epigenetic suppression, together with other important factors such as changes in population size.
AbstractThermotolerance is a polygenic trait that contributes to cell survival and growth under unusually high temperatures. Although some genes associated with high-temperature growth (Htg+) have been identified, how cells accumulate mutations to achieve prolonged thermotolerance is still mysterious. Here, we conducted experimental evolution of a Saccharomyces cerevisiae laboratory strain with stepwise temperature increases for it to grow at 42 °C. Whole genome resequencing of 14 evolved strains and the parental strain revealed a total of 153 mutations in the evolved strains, including single nucleotide variants, small INDELs, and segmental duplication/deletion events. Some mutations persisted from an intermediate temperature to 42 °C, so they might be Htg+ mutations. Functional categorization of mutations revealed enrichment of exonic mutations in the SWI/SNF complex and F-type ATPase, pointing to their involvement in high-temperature tolerance. In addition, multiple mutations were found in a general stress-associated signal transduction network consisting of Hog1 mediated pathway, RAS-cAMP pathway, and Rho1-Pkc1 mediated cell wall integrity pathway, implying that cells can achieve Htg+ partly through modifying existing stress regulatory mechanisms. Using pooled segregant analysis of five Htg+ phenotype-orientated pools, we inferred causative mutations for growth at 42 °C and identified those mutations with stronger impacts on the phenotype. Finally, we experimentally validated a number of the candidate Htg+ mutations. This study increased our understanding of the genetic basis of yeast tolerance to high temperature.
AbstractThe common ancestry of archaea and eukaryotes is evident in their genome architecture. All eukaryotic and several archaeal genomes consist of multiple chromosomes, each replicated from multiple origins. Three scenarios have been proposed for the evolution of this genome architecture: 1) mutational diversification of a multi-copy chromosome; 2) capture of a new chromosome by horizontal transfer; 3) acquisition of new origins and splitting into two replication-competent chromosomes. We report an example of the third scenario: the multi-origin chromosome of the archaeon Haloferax volcanii has split into two elements via homologous recombination. The newly generated elements are bona fide chromosomes, because each bears "chromosomal" replication origins, rRNA loci, and essential genes. The new chromosomes were stable during routine growth but additional genetic manipulation, which involves selective bottlenecks, provoked further rearrangements. To the best of our knowledge, rearrangement of a naturally evolved prokaryotic genome to generate two new chromosomes has not been described previously.
On October 13, 2017, a sandstorm blew off the west coast of Africa, creating a plume of dust that stretched thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean and reached the Caribbean five days later. Each year, up to five billion tons of dust is ejected into the earth's atmosphere, mostly from large deserts like the Sahara in Africa and the Gobi in Asia. Such dust plumes affect all regions of the planet, with some individual plumes even circling the globe.
AbstractRibosomes are highly abundant in cells and comprise, besides RNAs of varying lengths, 55–80 similarly sized, short proteins. This seemingly unusual composition is thought to have resulted from selection for rapid autocatalytic ribosome production. Here, we demonstrate that ribosomal protein-splitting mutations cannot accelerate ribosome production. The autocatalytic explanation is also unnecessary, because protein lengths generally decline with expression levels. Although ribosomal proteins are shorter than expected from their expression levels, they are not outliers among members of large protein complexes in mean protein length or coefficient of variation. These observations are explainable because 1) shortening proteins lowers their synthetic cost and reduces the waste from mistranslation-induced protein dysfunction and degradation, 2) such benefits rise with expression levels, and 3) members of large complexes participate in more protein–protein interactions so are less tolerant to mistranslation. These and other considerations suggest that the compositional features of ribosomes originate from cellular energy economics.
AbstractDNA methylation is an evolutionary ancient epigenetic modification that is phylogenetically widespread. Comparative studies of the methylome across a diverse range of non-conventional and conventional model organisms is expected to help reveal how the landscape of DNA methylation and its functions have evolved. Here, we explore the DNA methylation profile of two species of the crustacean Daphnia using whole genome bisulfite sequencing. We then compare our data with the methylomes of two insects and two mammals to achieve a better understanding of the function of DNA methylation in Daphnia. Using RNA-sequencing data for all six species, we investigate the correlation between DNA methylation and gene expression. DNA methylation in Daphnia is mainly enriched within the coding regions of genes, with the highest methylation levels observed at exons 2–4. In contrast, vertebrate genomes are globally methylated, and increase towards the highest methylation levels observed at exon 2, and maintained across the rest of the gene body. Although DNA methylation patterns differ among all species, their methylation profiles share a bimodal distribution across the genomes. Genes with low levels of CpG methylation and gene expression are mainly enriched for species specific genes. In contrast, genes associated with high methylated CpG sites are highly transcribed and evolutionary conserved across all species. Finally, the positive correlation between internal exons and gene expression potentially points to an evolutionary conserved mechanism, whereas the negative regulation of gene expression via methylation of promoters and exon 1 is potentially a secondary mechanism that has been evolved in vertebrates.
AbstractIn species with large population sizes such as Drosophila, natural selection may have substantial effects on genetic diversity and divergence. However, the implications of this widespread nonneutrality for standard population genetic assumptions and practices remain poorly resolved. Here, we assess the consequences of recurrent hitchhiking (RHH), in which selective sweeps occur at a given rate randomly across the genome. We use forward simulations to examine two published RHH models for D. melanogaster, reflecting relatively common/weak and rare/strong selection. We find that unlike the rare/strong RHH model, the common/weak model entails a slight degree of Hill–Robertson interference in high recombination regions. We also find that the common/weak RHH model is more consistent with our genome-wide estimate of the proportion of substitutions fixed by natural selection between D. melanogaster and D. simulans (19%). Finally, we examine how these models of RHH might bias demographic inference. We find that these RHH scenarios can bias demographic parameter estimation, but such biases are weaker for parameters relating recently diverged populations, and for the common/weak RHH model in general. Thus, even for species with important genome-wide impacts of selective sweeps, neutralist demographic inference can have some utility in understanding the histories of recently diverged populations.
AbstractDNA acquisition via genetic recombination is considered advantageous as it has the potential to bring together beneficial mutations that emerge independently within a population. Furthermore, recombination is considered to contribute to the maintenance of genome stability by purging slightly deleterious mutations. The prevalence of recombination differs among prokaryotic species and depends on the accessibility of DNA transfer mechanisms. An exceptional example is the human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) where no clear transfer mechanisms have been so far characterized and the presence of recombination is questioned. Here, we analyze completely assembled MTB genomes in search for evidence of recombination. We find that putative recombination events are enriched in strains reconstructed by reference-guided assembly and in regions with unreliable alignments. In addition, assembly and alignment artefacts introduce phylogenetic signals that are conflicting the established MTB phylogeny. Our results reveal that the so far reported recombination events in MTB are likely to stem from methodological artefacts. We conclude that no reliable signal of recombination is observed in the currently available MTB genomes. Moreover, our study demonstrates the limitations of reference-guided genome assembly for phylogenetic reconstructions. Rigorously de novo assembled genomes of high quality are mandatory in order to distinguish true evolutionary signal from noise, in particular for low diversity species such as MTB.
AbstractMycobacterium africanum consists of Lineages L5 and L6 of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) and causes human tuberculosis in specific regions of Western Africa, but is generally not transmitted in other parts of the world. Since M. africanum is evolutionarily closely placed between the globally dispersed Mycobacterium tuberculosis and animal-adapted MTBC-members, these lineages provide valuable insight into M. tuberculosis evolution. Here, we have collected 15 M. africanum L5 strains isolated in France over 4 decades. Illumina sequencing and phylogenomic analysis revealed a previously underappreciated diversity within L5, which consists of distinct sublineages. L5 strains caused relatively high levels of extrapulmonary tuberculosis and included multi- and extensively drug-resistant isolates, especially in the newly defined sublineage L5.2. The specific L5 sublineages also exhibit distinct phenotypic characteristics related to in vitro growth, protein secretion and in vivo immunogenicity. In particular, we identified a PE_PGRS and PPE-MPTR secretion defect specific for sublineage L5.2, which was independent of PPE38. Furthermore, L5 isolates were able to efficiently secrete and induce immune responses against ESX-1 substrates contrary to previous predictions. These phenotypes of Type VII protein secretion and immunogenicity provide valuable information to better link genome sequences to phenotypic traits and thereby understand the evolution of the MTBC.
AbstractWe previously proposed that changes in the efficiency of protein translation are associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). This hypothesis connects environmental factors and genetic factors because each can alter translation efficiency. For genetic factors, we previously tested our hypothesis using a small set of ASD-associated genes, a small set of ASD-associated variants, and a statistic to quantify by how much a single nucleotide variant (SNV) in a protein coding region changes translation speed. In this study, we confirm and extend our hypothesis using a published set of 1,800 autism quartets (parents, one affected child and one unaffected child) and genome-wide variants. Then, we extend the test statistic to combine translation efficiency with other possibly relevant variables: ribosome profiling data, presence/absence of CpG dinucleotides, and phylogenetic conservation. The inclusion of ribosome profiling abundances strengthens our results for male–male sibling pairs. The inclusion of CpG information strengthens our results for female–female pairs, giving an insight into the significant gender differences in autism incidence. By combining the single-variant test statistic for all variants in a gene, we obtain a single gene score to evaluate how well a gene distinguishes between affected and unaffected siblings. Using statistical methods, we compute gene sets that have some power to distinguish between affected and unaffected siblings by translation efficiency of gene variants. Pathway and enrichment analysis of those gene sets suggest the importance of Wnt signaling pathways, some other pathways related to cancer, ATP binding, and ATP-ase pathways in the etiology of ASDs.
AbstractMany organisms have a global mechanism for dosage compensation (DC) operating along the entire male X chromosome, which equalizes gene expression on the male X with that on the two Xs in females and/or on autosomes. At the initial stage of sex chromosome evolution, however, gene-by-gene (or localized) DC may also be necessary because the degeneration of Y-linked genes occurs independently at different times. We therefore tested whether the up-regulation of X-linked genes depends on the status of their Y-linked homologs, using the young sex chromosomes, neo-X and neo-Y, in Drosophila miranda. In support of the presence of gene-by-gene DC, the extent of up-regulation in males was indeed higher for neo-X-linked genes with pseudogenized neo-Y-linked homologs than for neo-X-linked genes with functional neo-Y-linked homologs. Further molecular evolutionary analysis also supports the idea that many individual neo-X-linked genes first acquired the potential for up-regulation, which then enabled the pseudogenization of neo-Y-linked homologs, without serious deleterious effects on male fitness.
AbstractThe study of microbe domestication has witnessed major advances that contribute to a better understanding of the emergence of artificially selected phenotypes and set the foundations of their rational improvement for biotechnology. Several features make Saccharomyces cerevisiae an ideal model for such a study, notably the availability of a catalogue of signatures of artificial selection and the extensive knowledge available on its biological processes. Here, we investigate with population and comparative genomics a set of strains used for cachaça fermentation, a Brazilian beverage based on the fermentation of sugar cane juice. We ask if the selective pressures posed by this fermentation have given rise to a domesticated lineage distinct from the ones already known, like wine, beer, bread, and sake yeasts. Our results show that cachaça yeasts derive from wine yeasts that have undergone an additional round of domestication, which we define as secondary domestication. As a consequence, cachaça strains combine features of wine yeasts, such as the presence of genes relevant for wine fermentation and advantageous gene inactivations, with features of beer yeasts like resistance to the effects of inhibitory compounds present in molasses. For other markers like those related to sulfite resistance and biotin metabolism our analyses revealed distributions more complex than previously reported that support the secondary domestication hypothesis. We propose a multilayered microbe domestication model encompassing not only transitions from wild to primarily domesticated populations, as in the case of wine yeasts, but also secondary domestications like those of cachaça yeasts.
AbstractDust and sandstorm events inject substantial quantities of foreign microorganisms into global ecosystems, with the ability to impact distant environments. The majority of these microorganisms originate from deserts and drylands where the soil is laden with highly stress-resistant microbes capable of thriving under extreme environmental conditions, and a substantial portion of them survive long journeys through the atmosphere. This large-scale transmission of highly resilient alien microbial contaminants raises concerns with regards to the invasion of sensitive and/or pristine sink environments, and to human health—concerns exacerbated by increases in the rate of desertification. Further increases in the transport of dust-associated microbiota could extend the spread of foreign microbes to new ecosystems, increase their load in present sink environments, disrupt ecosystem balance, and potentially introduce new pathogens. Our present understanding of these microorganisms, their phylogenic affiliations and functional significance, is insufficient to determine their impact. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of available data regarding dust and sandstorm microbiota and their potential ramifications on human and ecosystem health. We conclude by discussing current gaps in dust and sandstorm microbiota research, and the need for collaborative studies involving high-resolution meta-omic approaches in conjunction with extensive ecological time-series studies to advance the field towards an improved and sufficient understanding of these invisible atmospheric travelers and their global ramifications.
AbstractThe globin gene superfamily has been well-characterized in vertebrates, however, there has been limited research in early-diverging lineages, such as phylum Cnidaria. This study aimed to identify globin genes in multiple cnidarian lineages, and use bioinformatic approaches to characterize the evolution, structure, and expression of these genes. Phylogenetic analyses and in silico protein predictions showed that all cnidarians have undergone an expansion of globin genes, which likely have a hexacoordinate protein structure. Our protein modeling has also revealed the possibility of a single pentacoordinate globin lineage in anthozoan species. Some cnidarian globin genes displayed tissue and development specific expression with very few orthologous genes similarly expressed across species. Our phylogenetic analyses also revealed that eumetazoan globin genes form a polyphyletic relationship with vertebrate globin genes. Overall, our analyses suggest that a Ngb-like and GbX-like gene were most likely present in the globin gene repertoire for the last common ancestor of eumetazoans. The identification of a large-scale expansion and subfunctionalization of globin genes in actiniarians provides an excellent starting point to further our understanding of the evolution and function of the globin gene superfamily in early-diverging lineages.
AbstractDrosophila guanche is a member of the obscura group that originated in the Canary Islands archipelago upon its colonization by D. subobscura. It evolved into a new species in the laurisilva, a laurel forest present in wet regions that in the islands have only minor long-term weather fluctuations. Oceanic island endemic species such as D. guanche can become model species to investigate not only the relative role of drift and adaptation in speciation processes but also how population size affects nucleotide variation. Moreover, the previous identification of two satellite DNAs in D. guanche makes this species attractive for studying how centromeric DNA evolves. As a prerequisite for its establishment as a model species suitable to address all these questions, we generated a high-quality D. guanche genome sequence composed of 42 cytologically mapped scaffolds, which are assembled into six super-scaffolds (one per chromosome). The comparative analysis of the D. guanche proteome with that of twelve other Drosophila species identified 151 genes that were subject to adaptive evolution in the D. guanche lineage, with a subset of them being involved in flight and genome stability. For example, the Centromere Identifier (CID) protein, directly interacting with centromeric satellite DNA, shows signals of adaptation in this species. Both genomic analyses and FISH of the two satellites would support an ongoing replacement of centromeric satellite DNA in D. guanche.
AbstractThe emergence of robust single-cell 'omics techniques enables studies of uncultivable species, allowing for the (re)discovery of diverse genomic features. In this study, we combine single-cell genomics and transcriptomics to explore genome evolution in ciliates (a > 1 Gy old clade). Analysis of the data resulting from these single-cell 'omics approaches show: 1) the description of the ciliates in the class Karyorelictea as "primitive" is inaccurate because their somatic macronuclei contain loci of varying copy number (i.e., they have been processed by genome rearrangements from the zygotic nucleus); 2) gene-sized somatic chromosomes exist in the class Litostomatea, consistent with Balbiani's (1890) observation of giant chromosomes in this lineage; and 3) gene scrambling exists in the underexplored Postciliodesmatophora (the classes Heterotrichea and Karyorelictea, abbreviated here as the Po-clade), one of two major clades of ciliates. Together these data highlight the complex evolutionary patterns underlying germline genome architectures in ciliates and provide a basis for further exploration of principles of genome evolution in diverse microbial lineages.


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Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.
Vintage photos of:
One of my brother's high school classmates. With his Rolleicord, cable release, tripod, light meter and box of Sylvania Superflash flashbulbs, he's obvioulsly the school's go-to guy for photography. The white thing hanging on the tripod is a program for the senior play, "George Washington Slept Here," and he's here in the gym/auditorium to shoot a dress rehearsal. So's my brother, unofficially, with a roll of Ektachrome in his camera. This is a double-exposure, first shot without flash, explaining the phantom images around the bulbs and on the flash unit mount. Doesn't explain why there's a roll of Life Savers in the flash unit, though. Does add a little color interest to it, however. Oh, and I love his clothes, seriously. View full size.
Washington, D.C., 1926. "Maytag Co. display at Industrial Exposition." 8x10 glass negative, National Photo Company Collection. View full size.
Arlington Brewing Co. circa 1920. An 8x10 glass negative that would leave your fancy-schmancy digtal SLR crying for its mommy. View full size. Nat'l Photo.
Washington, D.C., circa 1919. "Georgetown" is all the caption says. 8x0 glass negative, National Photo Co. Collection, Library of Congress. View full size.
Washington, D.C., circa 1917. The National Photo Company office at 815 H Street N.W. View full size. National Photo Company Collection glass negative.
Washington D.C., 1921. "Star (Central High)." View full size. National Photo Co.
November 23, 1912. Providence, Rhode Island. "A midnight crap game in the street near the Post Office. One 12 years old, one 14. One had been shooting here a couple of hours." View full size. Photo and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.
June 1942. "TVA chemical plant where elemental phosphorus is made. Vicinity of Muscle Shoals, Alabama." View full size. 4x5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer for the Office of War Information.


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Discover the many possibilities:
- Enjoy – Interpretative arts and theatrical performances
- Discover – Historic treasures brimming with tales
- Explore – Elegant plantations and Civil War museums
Learn why people treasure their land and relish in their labors of love. Visit Georgia's Plantation Trace.
Click here for more information on The Plantation Trace.


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15 Jun 2012 10:33:02 AM
The Fourteen Ugliest Walkout Shirts in MMA
Yes, it's ugly, trashy and tasteless to include Arianny on this list. Just like this t-shirt. Props: UFCStore.com
MMA fighters aren't exactly known for their fashion sense. So it should come as little surprise that most MMA t-shirt companies produce some pretty questionable designs. The rampant abuse of foil print, skulls, chains, tribal designs and nautical stars among most MMA t-shirts is bad enough on its own; even worse when you consider that they sell for thirty bucks a pop.
Which I guess makes it all the worse when a fighter makes his way to the cage covered in an "athletic fit" Old-English mess. Not only is the shirt revolting, but it's going to sell for an outlandish sum of money, and be worn by every overweight Texas Roadhouse chef, milquetoast tech support geek and muscle-bound frat boy.
Perhaps the reason that we've never attempted an "Ugliest Walkout Shirts" post is because ranking these train wrecks is like ranking, well, actual train wrecks. No matter what order you place them in, you're a total scumbag for attempting to rank a tragedy from most to least depressing. And besides, you're clearly wrong about which one belongs at number three. For that reason, these will not be ranked, per se, but rather categorized. How you feel these shirts fall into place is up to you.
Let's start with the most obvious category:Read More DIGG THIS


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Welcome to the Virtual Patient Work Website.
Virtualpatient-Work.Net is a brand new e-learning platform offering our best English, Spanish and German virtual patients in Occupational Medicine (OM) totally free of charge! Here you will find virtual patients targeted for the uninitiated, the professional and everyone in between.
Our high-quality virtual patients authored by experts in the field cover OM applied on a wide range of professions. Virtualpatient-Work.Net gives the student of OM a great chance to in an interactive and problem-based learning approach practice and improve his or her acquired knowledge.
For instant access to our free virtual patients, please subscribe here. Exact information on how to subscribe is found here.
New flyer describing our project: to be presented at the 7th Congress of the Scientific Committee on Education and Training in Occupational Health


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The results of this effort indicate the following:
Sensitivity - 100%
Specificity - 94%
Positive Predictive Value - 95%
Negative Predictive Value - 100%
Non-invasive studies that correlate with the gold standard 90% or more of the time are very good. Certainly these statistics compare very favorably with those of high quality non-invasive vascular laboratories across the country.
How did you find these people?
I'm not sure whether this is a binary test, or whether there is some value judgement made about the degree of disease, but this certainly seems to be the best, most cost effective option. Although I am now sure what "3 tests" means, if it means 3 tests is over time, then we might be able to evaluate a subject for less than $200 using this method including blood work.
Lets figure on 20 people. $4,000.
Vitamin C and lysine for 20 people for 1 month $100 * 20, or $2,000
So for $6,000 to $10,000 we can study 20 people.
For $3,000 to $5,000 we can study 10 people.
After I learn what you know about this service, I may try to contact them and see how we might enroll people and monitor results.


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Ted Siefer's City Hall: 2013 was a year of big changes, heated feuds and mysteryBy TED SIEFER
New Hampshire Union Leader
December 28. 2013 9:06PM
It was a year that saw the selection of a new school superintendent; a young upstart politician take on the city's popular mayor; a war of words between a fiery alderman and city police officers; and, yes, a ban on school cupcake parties. Here's a look back at the odd and eventful year in Manchester politics.
I'll humbly submit that picking a new superintendent to lead the state's largest and, well, most complicated school district was the most significant event of the year. Mayor Ted Gatsas himself regarded the position as "the most important hire" the city would make, and he helped rustle up donations to fund a national search. Three out-of-state finalists were brought to Manchester in June and put through a gauntlet of meetings and forums, only to be sent packing by the school board.
In the end, in the final days before Thomas Brennan stepped down as school chief, the board settled on a candidate much closer to home: Debra Livingston, who was the head of the Fall Mountain Regional School District. In no time, Livingston had to grapple with classroom crowding and an uproar over the Common Core State Standards. Suffice to say, the challenges will continue in the new year.
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Livingston inherited another problem, and it's one that has only intensified in recent weeks: the feud with Hooksett. Angered by large class sizes, the Hooksett School Board last year declared Manchester in breach of the contract under which it sends its high school students to the city. Things escalated when Manchester sued Hooksett for allegedly violating the contract by allowing a large number of students to transfer schools. In July, the parties seemed to be headed toward reconciliation, reaching a legal settlement that released Hooksett from the remaining 10 years of the contract while requiring the town to pay a higher tuition rate, as well as $200,000, and to negotiate future plans to send high school students to the city in "good faith."
For the three-person majority on the Hooksett board, the settlement was a signal to move full steam ahead toward a contract with Pinkerton Academy in Derry. The board approved a contract this month, and now Manchester is again pursuing legal action, on the grounds the town is violating the settlement.
The Pinkerton contract must still go before Hooksett voters in March. This will put to the test Mayor Gatsas' contention that many Hooksett families want to see the 100-year relationship with Manchester continue.
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On its face, the 2013 municipal election was not earthshaking; it largely saw incumbents get reelected, including the mayor, and the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats (on technically nonpartisan boards), stay the same. The Democrats hold majorities on each. But the campaign of 30-year-old Alderman Patrick Arnold, a relative no-name before the election, was aggressive and well-run. Yes, Gatsas still won a third term by a comfortable 6-point margin, but Arnold deprived him of the double-digit victories and clean sweeps of all 12 wards that he enjoyed in his past wins.
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The biggest non-story of the election might have been the Charter Commission. The panel is convened once a decade to propose changes to the city's system of government. But the commission was marred by infighting and often seemed to lack a clear sense of direction. In the end, the panel proposed relatively modest changes - and these were defeated by voters. One of the top proposals was to raise the mayor's salary to $100,000, and the consensus was that was a non-starter.
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One of the bigger votes taken by the aldermen concerned an ambulance contract, which pitted current provider American Medical Response against American Ambulance of New England. Both are divisions of large national companies, and the battle was rife with corporate intrigue, with the top AMR executive defecting to its rival. AMR started out at a big disadvantage, having faced a deluge of complaints over the size of its bills and aggressive collection practices. And then it was revealed that the committee tasked with reviewing the proposals backed American over AMR. But the tide turned in favor of AMR when Fire Chief James Burkush and Mayor Gatsas said they were impressed by the reforms implemented by the company.
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Moving to the category of unsolved mysteries, last year, the popular principal of Manchester High School West, MaryEllen McGorry, was abruptly suspended. Over the winter and spring, the district racked up more than $350,000 in legal expenses before McGorry was finally terminated, with her health benefits continuing for the remainder of the school year. The district, citing privacy laws, has never disclosed what prompted McGorry's departure.
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In January, Manchester police officers turned out in force at an aldermen's meeting to speak out against Alderman-At-Large Joe Kelly Levasseur over public remarks he made that allegedly disparaged the police. Things were tense - and they got even tenser after the meeting, when there was a confrontation between Levasseur and the head of the patrolmen union.
The encounter set the stage for a year of drama between the alderman and the police.
When there were accusations of wrongdoing against the police, Levasseur never seemed to be very far away. As a lawyer, he successfully represented the young man accused of shoplifting in a parking lot sting, and the charges were dropped. The police in turn have accused Levasseur of fabricating allegations about the encounter after the aldermen's meeting last January. That's now the subject of an investigation by the state Attorney General's Office.
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And finally, we come to the cupcakes.
The Board of School Committee in May voted, 10-5, in favor of a policy that would limit sweet-filled school birthday - and holiday - parties to one per month.
Additional parties could be held as long as "nutrition standards for healthy snacks are followed."
The change was only one component of an update to the Manchester district's "wellness and nutrition policy," but it proved to be the most controversial, garnering widespread media attention.
The board engaged in spirited debate over the "cupcake policy" and the larger issue of how to regulate nutrition in the schools. Ward 10 school board member John Avard assailed the treat restrictions and the larger impetus behind guidelines issued in recent years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which largely funds the food programs in Manchester and other districts around the country. "Let's face the facts - I don't think any child got obese by eating school food. The poor dietary habits are coming out of households," he said.
"I know it's a difficult decision to make," then-Superintendent Thomas Brennan said. "But the more we read about obesity, the more I think there's an appropriate role to play in education, in telling people what food's OK or not. There are plenty of places where kids can get that type of food, but I don't think that it belongs in the school house."
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I'm not one for predictions, but we know this much: with Dave Gelinas not returning in January, the school board at its first meeting will be electing a new vice chairman. It's a powerful post, responsible for literally setting the agenda for the board, in consultation with the mayor and the top school administrators. Who will be the new vice chair? My money is on the mayor's buddy, Dave Wihby.
I'll leave other predictions for the new year to wiser folks, including the question of whether Mayor Gatsas will throw his hat in the ring for governor.
Happy New Year to all!
Ted Siefer is the City Hall reporter for the New Hampshire Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News. He can be reached at email@example.com and followed on Twitter: @tbsreporter


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Senate passes immigrant driver's license bill
By LAUREN GAMBINO
Of the Associated Press
SALEM — The Oregon Senate approved a proposal on Tuesday to grant short-term driver's licenses to people living in the country illegally — a turnaround from five years ago when the Legislature passed a law requiring proof of citizenship or lawful residency to obtain the document.
The Senate approved the bill on a 20-7 vote with little discussion. It now goes to the House, where a vote is expected by the end of the week.
"It is not a perfect solution," said Sen. Chuck Thomsen, a Hood River Republican and a sponsor of the bill. "But in light of the federal government's inactivity on this subject, it is needed as a stop-gap measure."
Supporters say the licensing program will improve public safety, because more drivers would be trained and insured.
U.S. lawmakers unveiled a sweeping immigration bill last week that would, among other things, put an estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally on a path to citizenship if certain border security goals are met.
Under Oregon's bill, immigrants, among others, who have lived in Oregon for at least a year and meet other requirements, could apply for driver's licenses without proving legal presence.
The card would be valid only for four years — half as long as a standard Oregon license — and could be used only for driving privileges. The card could not be used to vote, board a plane or purchase a firearm, for example.
Homeless people, elderly people or veterans, among others who have lost or never had a birth certificate, would also qualify for a driver's card under the bill.
The bill would partially ease the 2008 law that required driver's license applicants to prove they are citizens or lawful residents of the U.S.
"The law that we passed previously didn't really take anybody off the road, it just put more uninsured drivers on the road," said Sen. Lee Beyer, a Eugene Democrat and supporter of the bill.
The bill sparked controversy at a lengthy public hearing earlier this month. Lawmakers heard from people who said they feared the proposal will create a culture of crime in the state, drawing drug traffickers and other criminals to Oregon.
The bill was designed over the course of two years to gather support from both political parties and various interest groups. It was crafted by a governor-appointed task force that knit together a strategic alliance among Republican and Democratic lawmakers and interest groups representing law enforcement, agriculture and insurance companies.
Officials from the Oregon Department of Transportation said they expect as many as 84,000 people to apply for the new driver's licenses during the first nine months of the program, if the legislation is passed. The licensing program would begin Jan. 1, 2014.
Oregon is one of several states, including Colorado and Maryland, considering proposals to grant driver's licenses to people who cannot prove they are legally in the United States.
Illinois, New Mexico, Washington and Utah grant driver's licenses to those living in the country illegally.


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