Fruit-loving lemurs score higher on spatial memory tests

Food-finding tests in five lemur species show that fruit-eaters may have better spatial memory than lemurs with a more varied diet.

The results support the idea that relying on foods that are seasonally available and far-flung gives a competitive edge to individuals with certain cognitive abilities — such as remembering where the goodies are.

In a study appearing in the journal Animal Cognition, researchers Alexandra Rosati at Yale University and Kerri Rodriguez and Brian Hare of Duke compared spatial memory skills across five species of lemurs living in captivity at the Duke Lemur Center — fruit-eating red-ruffed and black-and-white ruffed lemurs, leaf-eating Coquerel’s sifakas, and ring-tailed and mongoose lemurs that eat a mix of fruit, leaves, seeds, flowers, nectar and insects.

A total of 64 animals took part in the studies, which measured their ability to remember the locations of food treats in mazes and boxes. The results are consistent with these species’ foraging behavior in the wild, the researchers say, with fruit-eaters doing well and omnivores lagging behind.

In the first experiment, the lemurs learned the location of food hidden in one of two arms of a T-shaped maze. A week later, the fruit-eating ruffed lemurs were the only species able to retain and recall the right spot.

A second experiment tested whether the lemurs were recalling the exact spot or just remembering the turns they took along the way. First the lemurs learned how to find a piece of food hidden in one wing of a symmetrical cross-shaped maze. Ten minutes later, the lemurs were moved to a new starting position in the maze and released to find their way again.

The ruffed lemurs were most likely to set off again to the right spot in the cross-maze, even though they had to take new turns to get there. “Before they might have turned right, but now they had to turn left to get to the same spot,” Rosati said.

The results suggest that ruffed lemurs primarily rely on a memory of the place, rather than a memory of what turns they took. The other species showed a mix of both strategies.

Finally, to better reflect the situations lemurs face when foraging in the wild, a third experiment tested the lemurs’ ability to remember multiple locations. In the initial session, a lemur was allowed to explore a room containing eight open boxes, each marked with a distinct visual cue. Half the boxes were baited with food and half were empty. After the lemur learned which boxes contained food and which didn’t, all eight boxes were baited with food and covered with lids to keep it from view. Ten minutes later, when each lemur searched the room again, only the ruffed lemurs preferentially searched spots where they found food before.

In their native Madagascar, ruffed lemurs’ diets can exceed 90% fruit — especially figs. Remembering when and where to find food from one season to the next requires keen spatial skills and good powers of recall. Fruit is only ripe and ready to eat on a given tree for a limited time, and the next fruit-laden tree may be far away in the forest.

Coquerel’s sifakas eat mostly leaves, which are easier to find and available for more months of the year. And ring-tailed lemurs and mongoose lemurs — who finished in second and third place in many of the memory tests — can grab a snack pretty much anywhere, anytime, Rosati explained.

Animals living in captivity don’t have to forage for food in the same way they do in the wild, so the differences the experiments found are probably innate, not learned, the researchers said.

The study is part of a long history of research aimed at understanding the origins of primate intelligence. The most widely accepted idea is that humans and other primates owe their smarts to the demands of getting along in a group. But far fewer studies have examined the idea that some aspects of primate intelligence arose because they helped the animals deal with other challenges, such as foraging for food. The researchers point out that the most social species in this study — the ring-tailed lemurs — fell in the middle of the pack in terms of spatial memory skills.

“Our results suggests that different cognitive skills might evolve for different reasons,” Rosati said.

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Saving lemurs: Action plan devised to save Madagascar’s 101 lemur species

Lemurs, the most endangered mammal group on Earth, represent more than 20 per cent of the world’s primates. Native only to Madagascar, more than 90 percent of the species are threatened with extinction.

A Western University primatologist has teamed with 18 lemur conservationists and researchers, many of whom are from Madagascar or have been working there for decades, to devise an action plan to save Madagascar’s 101 lemur species. The action plan contains strategies for 30 different priority sites for lemur conservation and aims to help raise funds for individual projects.

Ian Colquhoun from Western’s Faculty of Social Science co-authored a ‘Policy Forum’ commentary titled “Averting Lemur Extinctions amid Madagascar’s Political Crisis” for the high-impact journal, Science, with many of the top primatologists in the world, including Christoph Schwitzer, head of research at Bristol Zoo Gardens and vice-chair for Madagascar of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) SSC Primate Specialist Group, and Russell Mittermeier, President of Conservation International and Chair of the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group.

Vital steps outlined by the collaborators include effective management of Madagascar’s protected areas, the creation of more reserves directly managed by local communities, and a long-term research presence in critical lemur sites.

“Through seed dispersal and attracting income through ecotourism, lemurs have important ecological and economic roles for Madagascar,” says Colquhoun, a professor in Western’s Department of Anthropology and Chair of the Master’s in Environment and Sustainability Program in Western’s Centre for Environment & Sustainability. “I think there is huge potential for Malagasy all over the island to take pride in their lemurs.”

Native to the shrinking and fragmented tropical and subtropical forests of Madagascar, off Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, lemurs are facing grave extinction risks driven by human disturbance of their habitats. Combined with increasing rates of poaching and the loss of funding for environmental programs by most international donors in the wake of the political crisis in Madagascar, challenges to lemur conservation are immense.

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Brain Implant Lets One Monkey Control Another

A monkey controlling the hand of its unconscious cage-mate with its thoughts may sound like animal voodoo, but it is a step towards returning movement to people with spinal cord injuries.

The hope is that people who are paralysed could have electrodes implanted in their brains that pick up their intended movements. These electrical signals could then be sent to a prosthetic limb, or directly to the person’s paralysed muscles, bypassing the injury in their spinal cord.

Ziv Williams at Harvard Medical School in Boston wanted to see if sending these signals to nerves in the spinal cord would also work, as this might ultimately give a greater range of movement from each electrode.

His team placed electrodes in a monkey’s brain, connecting them via a computer to wires going into the spinal cord of an anaesthetised, unconscious monkey. The unconscious monkey’s limbs served as the equivalent of paralysed limbs. A hand of the unconscious monkey was strapped to a joystick, controlling a cursor that the other monkey could see on a screen.

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Habitat of early apes: Evidence of the environment inhabited by Proconsul

A University of Rhode Island anthropologist, along with colleagues from an international team of scientists, has discovered definitive evidence of the environment inhabited by the early ape Proconsul on Rusinga Island, Kenya. The findings provide new insights into understanding and interpreting the connection between habitat preferences and the early diversification of the ape-human lineage.

Their research, which was published today in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrates that Proconsul and its primate relative Dendropithecus inhabited “a widespread, dense, multistoried, closed canopy” forest.

Holly Dunsworth, URI assistant professor of anthropology, said that the research team found fossils of a single individual of Proconsul, which lived 18 to 20 million years ago, among geological deposits that also contained tree stump casts, calcified roots and fossil leaves. The discovery underscores the importance of forested environments in the evolution of early apes.

“To have the vegetation of a habitat preserved right along with the fossil primates themselves isn’t a regular occurrence in primate paleontology,” she said. “It’s especially rare to have so many exquisite plant fossils preserved at ancient ape sites.”

Rusinga has been known since the 1980s for preserving a fossil ape and other creatures in a hollowed out, fossilized tree trunk. But it wasn’t until the research team’s discovery of additional tree trunks and fossil primates preserved in the same ancient soil that there was a strong link between the ape and its habitat at the site.

“It’s probably the best evidence linking ape to habitat that we could ask for,” Dunsworth said. “Combined with analyses of the roots, trunks and even beautifully preserved fossil leaves, it’s possible to say that the forest was a closed canopy one, meaning the arboreal animals, like Proconsul, could easily move from tree-to-tree without coming to the ground. This environmental evidence jibes with our behavioral interpretations of Proconsul anatomy–as being adapted for a life of climbing in the trees–and with present-day monkey and ape ecology.”

Additional evidence from the excavation site has shown that the landscape was stable for many years while the forest grew.

According to co-author Daniel Peppe of Baylor University, evidence from the forest soil suggests “the precipitation was seasonal with a distinct wet and dry period. During the dry season, there was probably relatively little rainfall,” he said. “Additionally, by studying fossil leaves at the site, we were able to estimate that there was about 55 to 100 inches of rainfall a year and the average annual temperature was between 73 and 94 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Research on Rusinga Island has been ongoing for more than 80 years and has resulted in the collection of thousands of mammal fossils, including many well-preserved specimens of Proconsul and other primates. Evidence from these fossils indicate that Proconsul probably had a body position somewhat similar to modern monkeys, but that details of its anatomy suggest some more ape-like climbing and clambering abilities. Since 2011, the research team’s work at the fossil forest site has resulted in the collection of several additional new primate fossils.

Dunsworth said that her work at the site is continuing.

“We don’t know exactly what we’re going to find, but without a doubt, if we keep searching, we’re going to find knowledge about early ape evolution, which was, of course, a significant chapter in our own history,” she said.

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Efficient treatment a step closer in fight against cancer-causing herpes

Herpes virus proteins are more ‘spaghetti-like’ than previously thought, which provides a vital clue in the search for an efficient treatment against a type of herpes which causes a form of cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma. That’s according to researchers from The University of Manchester who have discovered that the virus protein uses its flexible arms to pass on viral building blocks to the proteins of cells that it hijacks.

The latest part of this research is published in the February edition of PLoS Pathogens which has uncovered how the protein of cells hijacked by the herpes virus take on a ‘spaghetti-like’ structure.

The research provides the first ever molecular insight of how the herpes virus RNA, a type of molecule which helps to decode the generic blueprint of a virus, is transferred between viral and cellular proteins, thus helping the virus to hijack a cell. Dr Tunnicliffe, who is the first author of the paper, said: “Viruses cannot survive or replicate on their own — they need the resources and apparatus within a host cell to do so.”

In their studies, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the research team developed and used a new methodology which revealed how exactly flexible proteins interact together and with RNA.

Dr Tunnicliffe continues: “We have developed a novel technique which reveals how flexible molecules work together; this allowed us a glimpse of how the virus is able to compromise the workings of the cell that it infects.”

The research team has been using NMR — a technique related to the one used in MRI body scanners and capable of visualising molecules at the smallest scales — to examine how small components of herpes virus help it to multiply by binding themselves with other large molecules; this produced images of a monkey herpes virus protein interacting with mouse cellular protein and viral RNA. These images were then used to develop a 3D model of how viral RNA is recognised by this herpes virus protein and then passed on to the cellular protein of the host.

Although the model system studied here used protein from a species of herpes virus — which is only transmitted between squirrel monkeys, without actually doing much harm to them — these monkey herpes viruses are structurally very similar to viruses causing Kaposi’s sarcoma in humans. Understanding how monkey viruses work may help to find ways to prevent this type of cancer in humans.

Senior researcher Dr Alexander Golovanov, from the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology and Faculty of Life Sciences, said: “Initially proteins were thought to interact only as fitting rigid bodies — as a lock and key, for example. The fitting key is inserted into the lock, and that sets the rigid mechanism of a lock in action. Then the understanding evolved — it was found that not all protein ‘keys’ are rigid, some are more like boiled spaghetti which can still operate the rigid lock successfully, by adjusting its shape.”

Dr Golovanov continues: “Just recently, the ‘fuzzy’ protein complexes were discovered — it is as if not only the ‘key’ is made of flexible boiled spaghetti, but also parts of the lock itself are made of boiled spaghetti. This ‘spaghetti mechanism’ still manages perform a defined complex function, despite lacking rigidity. The viral proteins behave a lot like such spaghetti.”

He added: “Unfortunately, no effective antiviral treatment is currently available, which suppress viral replication efficiently enough. Finding a weak spot in the virus, which can be used to prevent Kaposi’s sarcoma in the future, therefore would make a significant breakthrough.”

Professor Melanie Welham, BBSRC Executive Director of Science, said: “This is an interesting technique which will help us understand more about the herpes virus and could be applied in virology research more generally. This is the type of excellent bioscience research underpinning health that BBSRC seeks to fund to deliver social and economic benefits for all.”

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What makes us human? Unique brain area linked to higher cognitive powers

Oxford University researchers have identified an area of the human brain that appears unlike anything in the brains of some of our closest relatives.

The brain area pinpointed is known to be intimately involved in some of the most advanced planning and decision-making processes that we think of as being especially human.

‘We tend to think that being able to plan into the future, be flexible in our approach and learn from others are things that are particularly impressive about humans. We’ve identified an area of the brain that appears to be uniquely human and is likely to have something to do with these cognitive powers,’ says senior researcher Professor Matthew Rushworth of Oxford University’s Department of Experimental Psychology.

MRI imaging of 25 adult volunteers was used to identify key components in the ventrolateral frontal cortex area of the human brain, and how these components were connected up with other brain areas. The results were then compared to equivalent MRI data from 25 macaque monkeys.

This ventrolateral frontal cortex area of the brain is involved in many of the highest aspects of cognition and language, and is only present in humans and other primates. Some parts are implicated in psychiatric conditions like ADHD, drug addiction or compulsive behaviour disorders. Language is affected when other parts are damaged after stroke or neurodegenerative disease. A better understanding of the neural connections and networks involved should help the understanding of changes in the brain that go along with these conditions.

The Oxford University researchers report their findings in the science journal Neuron.

Professor Rushworth explains: ‘The brain is a mosaic of interlinked areas. We wanted to look at this very important region of the frontal part of the brain and see how many tiles there are and where they are placed.

‘We also looked at the connections of each tile — how they are wired up to the rest of the brain — as it is these connections that determine the information that can reach that component part and the influence that part can have on other brain regions.’

From the MRI data, the researchers were able to divide the human ventrolateral frontal cortex into 12 areas that were consistent across all the individuals.

‘Each of these 12 areas has its own pattern of connections with the rest of the brain, a sort of “neural fingerprint,” telling us it is doing something unique,’ says Professor Rushworth.

The researchers were then able to compare the 12 areas in the human brain region with the organisation of the monkey prefrontal cortex.

Overall, they were very similar with 11 of the 12 areas being found in both species and being connected up to other brain areas in very similar ways.

However, one area of the human ventrolateral frontal cortex had no equivalent in the macaque — an area called the lateral frontal pole prefrontal cortex.

‘We have established an area in human frontal cortex which does not seem to have an equivalent in the monkey at all,’ says first author Franz-Xaver Neubert of Oxford University. ‘This area has been identified with strategic planning and decision making as well as “multi-tasking.” ‘

The Oxford research group also found that the auditory parts of the brain were very well connected with the human prefrontal cortex, but much less so in the macaque. The researchers suggest this may be critical for our ability to understand and generate speech.

The researchers were funded by the UK Medical Research Council.

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Monkeys that eat omega-3 rich diet show more developed brain networks

Monkeys that ate a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids had brains with highly connected and well organized neural networks — in some ways akin to the neural networks in healthy humans — while monkeys that ate a diet deficient in the fatty acids had much more limited brain networking, according to an Oregon Health & Science University study.

The study, published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, provides further evidence for the importance of omega-3 fatty acids in healthy brain development. It also represents the first time scientists have been able to use functional brain imaging in live animals to see the large-scale interaction of multiple brain networks in a monkey. These patterns are remarkably similar to the networks found in humans using the same imaging techniques.

“The data shows the benefits in how the monkeys’ brains organize over their lifetime if in the setting of a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids,” said Damien Fair, PA-C, Ph.D., assistant professor of behavioral neuroscience and assistant professor of psychiatry in the OHSU School of Medicine and senior author on the paper. “The data also shows in detail how similar the networks in a monkey brain are to networks in a human brain, but only in the context of a diet rich in omega-3-fatty acids.”

Omega-3 fatty acids are considered essential fatty acids for the human body. But while they are needed for human health, the body can’t make them — it has to get them through food.

The study measured a kind of omega-3 fatty acid called docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, which is a primary component of the human brain and important in development of the brain and vision. DHA is especially found in fatty fish and oils from those fish — including salmon, mackerel and tuna. Research by a co-author on the paper, Martha Neuringer, Ph.D., an associate scientist in the Division of Neuroscience at OHSU’s Oregon National Primate Research Center, previously showed the importance of DHA for infants’ visual development — a finding that led to the addition of DHA to infant formulas.

The scientists studied a group of older rhesus macaque monkeys — 17 to 19 years of age — from ONPRC that had been fed all of their lives either a diet low or high in omega-3 fatty acids, including DHA. The study found that the monkeys that had the high-DHA diet had strong connectivity of early visual pathways in their brains. It also found that monkeys with the high-DHA diet showed greater connections within various brain networks similar to the human brain — including networks for higher-level processing and cognition, said David Grayson, a former research assistant in Fair’s lab and first author on the paper. Grayson is now studying at the Center for Neuroscience, University of California-Davis.

“For example, we could see activity and connections within areas of the macaque brain that are important in the human brain for attention,” said Fair.

Now that those measurements and monitoring are possible, Fair said, the next step will be to analyze whether the monkeys with deficits in certain networks have behavioral patterns that are similar to behavioral patterns in humans with certain neurological or psychiatric conditions — including Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and autism.

Fair, who was among the 102 people given the 2013 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President Barack Obama, is a leader in using the same kind of brain imaging to explore brain networks in children with ADHD and autism. He said he hopes to use these non-invasive brain imaging techniques to provide an important link between research in humans and animals in order to better characterize, treat, and prevent these types of developmental mental health issues.

Fair added that another longer-term goal would be to study brain development in the monkeys fed various diets from birth into maturity.

“It would be important to see how a diet high in omega-3s might affect brain development early on in their lives, and across their lifespan,” Fair said.

The study was funded by the Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute (through National Institutes of Health grant UL1TR000128), several other NIH grants (grants UL1 RR024140, P510D011092, K99/R00 MH091238, R01 MH096773, EY13199, and DK29930) and the Foundation Fighting Blindness.

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Florida Hunts For Mischievous Monkey After Series Of Mysterious Car Break-Ins

Just when you thought it was safe to walk through the woods around Tampa Bay area without fear of being pelted by poop winged by a treed monkey, sightings of a rhesus macaque in the Apollo Beach area have popped up over the past few weeks.

Blurry yeti-esque cellphone photos of the creature have been making their way onto social media sites, and state wildlife officials and a local trapper are on the case.

The sightings come within a 16 months of the capture of Cornelius, a rhesus macaque which for four years had vexed and thrilled residents in Pinellas County. So popular was Cornelius, supporters created social media sites for the primate, and his following grew each time he narrowly avoided capture. His reign ended in October 2012 when he was plugged with a tranquilizer dart fired from a rifle wielded by Vernon Yates, director of Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation.

Yates said there may be two monkeys in south Hillsborough County, one in Apollo Beach, spotted in the Mira Bay community, and one spotted in Parrish, more than 10 miles away. Or, he said, it could be the same travelin’ macaque.

The latest rumor: The monkey opened a car door, got in, then got out in Apollo Beach and closed the door.

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Lemur lovers sync their scents: Strength of a lemur couple’s bond is reflected in the similarity of their scents

The strength of a lemur couple’s bond is reflected by the similarity of their scents, finds a new study.

“It’s like singing a duet, but with smells instead of sounds,” said Christine Drea, a Duke University professor who supervised the study.

Duke researchers sampled and analyzed scent secretions produced by lemurs known as Coquerel’s sifakas living at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, NC. The researchers also monitored the animals’ scent-marking and sniffing behavior across the breeding season.

They found that lemur lovers mirror each other’s scent-marking behavior, and that lemur couples with kids give off similar scents — possibly as a way to combine territory defenses or to advertise their relationship status to the rest of their group, the researchers say.

The lemurs spend the most time scent-marking and investigating each other’s odors before they have kids. After they reproduce, they smell more like each other.

The findings appear in the February 2014 edition of Animal Behaviour.

Coquerel’s sifakas are white-furred lemurs with chocolate-brown patches on their chests, arms and legs. They have glands on their throats and genital areas that produce a sticky goo that is dabbed on branches and tree trunks as the animals move through the forest.

To collect the data, the researchers used cotton swabs to sample scent secretions from the genital regions of eight males and seven females across different phases of the reproductive season.

Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry tests to identify the chemical ingredients in each animal’s unique aroma showed that sifaka scent secretions from the genital area alone contain more than 250 odor compounds.

The researchers also followed the behavior of six pairs of potential mates, measuring how often the animals smeared their scents on their surroundings — a behavior known as scent-marking — as well as how often they sniffed, licked, or marked over the scents left by other members of their group.

The animals mirrored the scent-marking behavior of their partners. “When one member of a pair started sniffing and scent-marking more often, their mate did too,” said Lydia Greene, a research associate in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology who conducted the study as a Duke undergraduate.

The couples without offspring that spend more time on scent-marking and investigating each other’s odors may be in a ‘getting-to-know-you’ period, the researchers say.

“If two animals have never reproduced, the male doesn’t necessarily know what the female smells like when she’s in heat, because they’ve never gone through this before. They might need to scent mark a lot more to figure out when it’s time to mate,” Greene said.

Sifaka couples with kids spent less time scent-marking and investigating each other’s odors, but their odor profiles were more similar than those of couples without kids, possibly due to the exchange of odor-producing bacteria during mating, grooming, or other forms of physical contact.

Surprisingly, the number of years a couple had lived together made no difference to their mating success or the similarity of their scents. “Some of the sifaka couples had been living together for quite a while, but hadn’t managed to produce an infant, whereas others had been living together for a really short period of time and had already successfully reproduced,” Greene said.

Figuring out what the sifakas’ chemical messages mean will take more time. The scent secretions of other lemur species contain hundreds of odor compounds that help the animals distinguish males from females, mark the boundaries of their territories, even tell when a female is fertile or sniff out the best mates. By sharing similar scent signals, sifaka couples could be jointly defending their territories, or advertising their bond to other lemurs in the group.

“It could be a signal that they’re a united front,” Drea said.

“[They could be saying] we’re a thing. We’ve bonded. Don’t mess with us,” Greene added.

This work was supported by Molly H. Glander Memorial Undergraduate Research Grants, Duke University Undergraduate Research Support grants, and by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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Precise gene editing in monkeys paves the way for valuable human disease models

Monkeys are important for modeling diseases because of their close similarities to humans, but past efforts to precisely modify genes in primates have failed. In a study published by Cell Press January 30th in the journal Cell, researchers achieved precise gene modification in monkeys for the first time using an efficient and reliable approach known as the CRISPR/Cas9 system. The study opens promising new avenues for the development of more effective treatments for a range of human diseases.

“Our study shows that the CRISPR/Cas9 system enables simultaneous disruption of two target genes in one step without producing off-target mutations,” says study author Jiahao Sha of Nanjing Medical University. “Considering that many human diseases are caused by genetic abnormalities, targeted genetic modification in monkeys is invaluable for the generation of human disease models.”

The CRISPR/Cas9 system is a gene editing tool capable of targeting specific DNA sequences in the genome. Cas9 proteins, which are directed by molecules called single-guide RNAs to specific sites in the genome, generate mutations by introducing double-stranded DNA breaks. Until now, the CRISPR/Cas9 system and other targeted gene editing techniques were successfully applied to mammals such as mice and rats, but not to primates.

Sha teamed up with Xingxu Huang of Nanjing University and Weizhi Ji of the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research and Kunming Biomed International. The researchers injected messenger RNA molecules encoding Cas9, in addition to single-guide RNAs designed to target three specific genes, into one-cell-stage embryos of cynomolgus monkeys. After sequencing genomic DNA from 15 embryos, they found that eight of these embryos showed evidence of simultaneous mutations in two of the target genes.

The researchers then transferred genetically modified embryos into surrogate females, one of which gave birth to a set of twins. By sequencing the twins’ genomic DNA, they found mutations in two of the target genes. Moreover, the CRISPR/Cas9 system did not produce mutations at genomic sites that were not targeted, suggesting that the tool will not cause undesirable effects when applied to monkeys. “With the precise genomic targeting of the CRISPR/Cas9 system, we expect that many disease models will be generated in monkeys, which will significantly advance the development of therapeutic strategies in biomedical research,” Ji says.

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Screening for transformed human mesenchymal stromal cells with tumorigenic potential

Researchers at Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam, The Netherlands, led by Dr. Qiuwei Pan and Dr. Luc van der Laan, have discovered that spontaneous tumorigenic transformation of human mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) can occur during cell culture expansion, although the frequency is relatively low and often only observed after extensive passage in culture. This report appears in the January 2014 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine.

Currently, MSCs are being widely investigated as a potential treatment for various diseases. According to ClinicalTrials.gov, over 350 clinical trials using MSCs have been registered by the end of 2013 (with a search of: mesenchymal stem cells). For cell transplantation, MSCs are often isolated from either the patient or from a third party donor, and then expanded in cell culture before therapeutic application. In fact, spontaneous transformation of primary cells in cell culture has been well-investigated over decades. Malignant transformation of murine and monkey MSCs has also recently been reported.

The current study confirmed that spontaneous tumorigenic transformation of human MSCs can occur during cell culture expansion. This potentially has large implications for the clinical application of ex vivo expanded MSCs. “Although this transformation is rare, we do need to carefully examine the presence of these aberrant cells in MSC cultures, before transplanting into patients,” stresses the first author Dr. Pan. “We now have identified RNA molecule signatures that can be applied as a potential biomarker for the detection of these dangerous cells in long-term cultures,” said senior author Dr. van der Laan. “However, further research is required to validate this biomarker in clinical grade cultures of MSCs that are used in clinical trials.”

Dr. Steven R. Goodman, Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Biology and Medicine said “This study provides a possible method for testing the safety of expanded adult stem cells. We look forward to the validation of these RNA biomarkers.”

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Genetically Modified Monkeys Created With Cut-And-Paste DNA

Researchers have created genetically modified monkeys with a revolutionary new procedure that enables scientists to cut and paste DNA in living organisms.

The macaques are the first primates to have their genetic makeup altered with the powerful technology which many scientists believe will lead to a new era of genetic medicine.

The feat was applauded by some researchers who said it would help them to recreate devastating human diseases in monkeys, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The ability to alter DNA with such precision is already being investigated as a way to make people resistant to HIV.

But the breakthrough is controversial, with groups opposed to animal testing warning that it could drive a rise in the use of monkeys in research. One critic said that genetic engineering gave researchers “almost limitless power to create sick animals”.

Full story here .

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