In PLOS Genetics, Stanford University's Carlos Bustamante and colleagues from the US, Mexico, Spain, and elsewhere brought together new and existing SNP data for more than 400 admixed Latino individuals from Peru, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador and Colombia in an effort to retrace migration and admixture events in South America. By comparing the samples to one another and to population reference panels from elsewhere, the team was able to tease apart European, Native American, African, and Asian ancestry patterns in the Latino individuals — information that helped to clarify the details and genetic consequences of historical population interactions on the continent. GenomeWeb has more on the study, here.
The expression of nearly 600 genes appears to vary in woodland strawberry plants from varieties with different fruit colors, according to a study in PLOS One. A Chinese team did RNA sequencing and de novo transcriptome assembly on fruit from Yellow Wonder and Rugen varieties of the woodland strawberry, Fragaria vesca, identifying transcripts that coincided with more than 75,400 individual genes. Among them were 224 genes found at higher-than-usual levels in yellow fruit from the Yellow Wonder plants and another 371 transcripts — including transcripts for genes from the flavonoid biosynthetic pathway — with more prominent expression in red fruit from the Ruegen woodland strawberries.
For another PLOS One paper, researchers from the Czech Republic, Italy, and Denmark explore genetic features found in the Czechoslovakian wolfdog, a breed developed by crossing wild Carpathian wolves with German Shepherds in the 1950s. Through sequencing on mitochondrial DNA sequences, sex-linked microsatellite sequencing, and autosomal microsatellite sequencing on 79 Czechoslovakian wolfdogs, 20 German Shepherds, and 28 Carpathian wolves, the team found that the Czechoslovakian wolfdogs carry genotypes that are largely distinct from those found in either parent species, though the present-day genome is composed of alleles that more frequently match those in dogs than in wolves.