There are 20 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
A Fish Eye Out of Water: Ten Visual Opsins in the Four-Eyed Fish, Anableps anableps:
The "four-eyed" fish Anableps anableps has numerous morphological adaptations that enable above and below-water vision. Here, as the first step in our efforts to identify molecular adaptations for aerial and aquatic vision in this species, we describe the A. anableps visual opsin repertoire. We used PCR, cloning, and sequencing to survey cDNA using unique primers designed to amplify eight sequences from five visual opsin gene subfamilies, SWS1, SWS2, RH1, RH2, and LWS. We also used Southern blotting to count opsin loci in genomic DNA digested with EcoR1 and BamH1. Phylogenetic analyses confirmed the identity of all opsin sequences and allowed us to map gene duplication and divergence events onto a tree of teleost fish. Each of the gene-specific primer sets produced an amplicon from cDNA, indicating that A. anableps possessed and expressed at least eight opsin genes. A second PCR-based survey of genomic and cDNA uncovered two additional LWS genes. Thus, A. anableps has at least ten visual opsins and all but one were expressed in the eyes of the single adult surveyed. Among these ten visual opsins, two have key site haplotypes not found in other fish. Of particular interest is the A. anableps-specific opsin in the LWS subfamily, S180γ, with a SHYAA five key site haplotype. Although A. anableps has a visual opsin gene repertoire similar to that found in other fishes in the suborder Cyprinodontoidei, the LWS opsin subfamily has two loci not found in close relatives, including one with a key site haplotype not found in any other fish species. A. anableps opsin sequence data will be used to design in situ probes allowing us to test the hypothesis that opsin gene expression differs in the distinct ventral and dorsal retinas found in this species.
Melanopsin Bistability: A Fly's Eye Technology in the Human Retina:
In addition to rods and cones, the human retina contains light-sensitive ganglion cells that express melanopsin, a photopigment with signal transduction mechanisms similar to that of invertebrate rhabdomeric photopigments (IRP). Like fly rhodopsins, melanopsin acts as a dual-state photosensitive flip-flop in which light drives both phototransduction responses and chromophore photoregeneration that bestows independence from the retinoid cycle required by rods and cones to regenerate photoresponsiveness following bleaching by light. To explore the hypothesis that melanopsin in humans expresses the properties of a bistable photopigment in vivo we used the pupillary light reflex (PLR) as a tool but with methods designed to study invertebrate photoreceptors. We show that the pupil only attains a fully stabilized state of constriction after several minutes of light exposure, a feature that is consistent with typical IRP photoequilibrium spectra. We further demonstrate that previous exposure to long wavelength light increases, while short wavelength light decreases the amplitude of pupil constriction, a fundamental property of IRP difference spectra. Modelling these responses to invertebrate photopigment templates yields two putative spectra for the underlying R and M photopigment states with peaks at 481 nm and 587 nm respectively. Furthermore, this bistable mechanism may confer a novel form of "photic memory" since information of prior light conditions is retained and shapes subsequent responses to light. These results suggest that the human retina exploits fly-like photoreceptive mechanisms that are potentially important for the modulation of non-visual responses to light and highlights the ubiquitous nature of photoswitchable photosensors across living organisms.
Stimulus Familiarity Affects Perceptual Restoration in the European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris):
Humans can easily restore a speech signal that is temporally masked by an interfering sound (e.g., a cough masking parts of a word in a conversation), and listeners have the illusion that the speech continues through the interfering sound. This perceptual restoration for human speech is affected by prior experience. Here we provide evidence for perceptual restoration in complex vocalizations of a songbird that are acquired by vocal learning in a similar way as humans learn their language. European starlings were trained in a same/different paradigm to report salient differences between successive sounds. The birds' response latency for discriminating between a stimulus pair is an indicator for the salience of the difference, and these latencies can be used to evaluate perceptual distances using multi-dimensional scaling. For familiar motifs the birds showed a large perceptual distance if discriminating between song motifs that were muted for brief time periods and complete motifs. If the muted periods were filled with noise, the perceptual distance was reduced. For unfamiliar motifs no such difference was observed. The results suggest that starlings are able to perceptually restore partly masked sounds and, similarly to humans, rely on prior experience. They may be a suitable model to study the mechanism underlying experience-dependent perceptual restoration.
Induction of Empathy by the Smell of Anxiety:
The communication of stress/anxiety between conspecifics through chemosensory signals has been documented in many vertebrates and invertebrates. Here, we investigate how chemosensory anxiety signals conveyed by the sweat of humans (N = 49) awaiting an academic examination are processed by the human brain, as compared to chemosensory control signals obtained from the same sweat donors in a sport condition. The chemosensory stimuli were pooled according to the donation condition and administered to 28 participants (14 males) synchronously to breathing via an olfactometer. The stimuli were perceived with a low intensity and accordingly only about half of the odor presentations were detected by the participants. The fMRI results (event-related design) show that chemosensory anxiety signals activate brain areas involved in the processing of social emotional stimuli (fusiform gyrus), and in the regulation of empathic feelings (insula, precuneus, cingulate cortex). In addition, neuronal activity within attentional (thalamus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) and emotional (cerebellum, vermis) control systems were observed. The chemosensory perception of human anxiety seems to automatically recruit empathy-related resources. Even though the participants could not attentively differentiate the chemosensory stimuli, emotional contagion seems to be effectively mediated by the olfactory system.
Large-Scale Assessment of the Effect of Popularity on the Reliability of Research:
Based on theoretical reasoning it has been suggested that the reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field. Here we provide empirical support for this prediction. We evaluate published statements on protein interactions with data from high-throughput experiments. We find evidence for two distinctive effects. First, with increasing popularity of the interaction partners, individual statements in the literature become more erroneous. Second, the overall evidence on an interaction becomes increasingly distorted by multiple independent testing. We therefore argue that for increasing the reliability of research it is essential to assess the negative effects of popularity and develop approaches to diminish these effects.
Diploid males in hymenopterans are generally either inviable or sterile, thus imposing a severe genetic load on populations. In species with the widespread single locus complementary sex determination (sl-CSD), sex depends on the genotype at one single locus with multiple alleles. Haploid (hemizygous) individuals are always males. Diploid individuals develop into females when heterozygous and into males when homozygous at the sex determining locus. Our comparison of the mating and reproductive success of haploid and diploid males revealed that diploid males of the braconid parasitoid Cotesia glomerata sire viable and fertile diploid daughters. Females mated to diploid males, however, produced fewer daughters than females mated to haploid males. Nevertheless, females did not discriminate against diploid males as mating partners. Diploid males initiated courtship display sooner than haploid males and were larger in body size. Although in most species so far examined diploid males were recognized as genetic dead ends, we present a second example of a species with sl-CSD and commonly occurring functionally reproductive diploid males. Our study suggests that functionally reproductive diploid males might not be as rare as hitherto assumed. We argue that the frequent occurrence of inbreeding in combination with imperfect behavioural adaptations towards its avoidance promote the evolution of diploid male fertility.
This study sought to determine how esthetic appearance of babies may affect their motivational processing by the adults. Healthy men and women were administered two laboratory-based tasks: a) key pressing to change the viewing time of normal-looking babies and of those with abnormal facial features (e.g., cleft palate, strabismus, skin disorders, Down's syndrome and fetal alcohol syndrome) and b) attractiveness ratings of these images. Exposure to the babies' images produced two different response patterns: for normal babies, there was a similar effort by the two groups to extend the visual processing with lower attractiveness ratings by men; for abnormal babies, women exerted greater effort to shorten the viewing time despite attractiveness ratings comparable to the men. These results indicate that gender differences in the motivational processing of babies include excessive (relative to the esthetic valuation) motivation to extend the viewing time of normal babies by men vs. shortening the exposure to the abnormal babies by women. Such gender-specific incentive sensitization phenomenon may reflect an evolutionary-derived need for diversion of limited resources to the nurturance of healthy offspring.
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