Naturally occurring left ventricular hyperplasia is a rare but lethal disease. There are very few reports of this cardiac disease in captive nonhuman primates. In a colony of Macaca mulatta (Rhesus monkey) at California National Primate Research Center, a large number of rhesus macaques were diagnosed by autopsy with naturally occurring left ventricular hypertrophy without obvious underlying diseases over a 22-year period. The confirmatory diagnosis of ventricular hypertrophy was based on findings of notable left ventricular concentric hypertrophy with reduced left ventricular lumen, which is very similar to human ventricular hypertrophy cases. This report discusses an 11-year-old Macaca fascicularis monkey (Cynomolgus monkey, crab-eating macaque), weighing 2.95 kg, that was presented for enrollment in a pharmacokinetic (PK) study. During the PK experiment, the monkey died following a sudden decrease in percutaneous oxygen saturation and heart rate. Gross and histological examinations of the heart were performed. On gross pathology, the left ventricular wall was thickened, and the chamber lumen was reduced. In histopathological examination using hematoxylin- eosin and Masson-trichrome stains, fibrosis and myocyte disarray were not observed, but an increased cell density, compared to the normal heart, was confirmed. The autopsy results confirmed left ventricular hyperplasia as the major cause of death.

This study investigated the potential associations of dog characteristics with serum serotonin (5HT) concentration in dogs with degenerative mitral valve disease (DMVD). Client-owned dogs were prospectively recruited at the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital of Chungnam National University between 2010 and 2011. Forty-two dogs (22 females and 20 males) were enrolled in this study. DMVD dogs included Maltese (n=12), followed by Shih-tzu (n=10), mixed breed (n=5), Chihuahua (n=4), Miniature schnauzer (n=3), Miniature poodle (n=3), Miniature pinscher (n=1), Pomeranian (n=1), Yorkshire terrier (n=2), and Spitz (n=1). As inclusion criteria for the study, dogs had to show either direct or echocardiographic evidence of DMVD. Platelet count significantly differed among the three groups, as the moderate (P<0.05) and severe groups (P<0.05) showed significantly higher platelet counts than the mild DMVD group. Additionally, significantly higher LVIDd, LVIDs, fractional shortening (FS), and LA:Ao ratios were observed in dogs with moderate (P<0.05) and severe (P<0.05) DMVD compared to the mild group, respectively. Significant positive correlations between serum 5-hydroxytryptamine (5HT) concentration and platelet count (r=0.273, P=0.03), LA:Ao ratio (r=0.459, P=0.001), and LVIDd (r=0.319, P=0.013) were observed in DMVD dogs. Therefore, serum 5HT concentration may be a potential cause of DMVD progression.

Although much effort has been made to find agronomically important loci in the soybean plant, extensive linkage disequilibrium and genome duplication have limited efficient genome-wide linkage analyses that can identify important regulatory genes. In this respect, recombination block-based analysis of cultivated plant genomes is a potential critical step for molecular breeding and target locus screening. We propose a new three-step method of detecting recombination blocks and comparative genomics of bred cultivars. It utilizes typical reshuffling features of their genomes, which have been generated by the recombination processes of breeding ancestral genomes. To begin with, mutations were detected by comparing genomes to a reference genome. Next, sequence blocks were examined for likenesses and difference with respect to the reference genome. The boundaries between the blocks were taken as recombination sites. All recombination sites found in the cultivar set were used to split the genomes, and the resulting sequence fragments were named as core recombination blocks (CRBs). Finally, the genomes were compared at the CRB level, instead of at the sequence level. In the genomes of the five Korean soybean cultivars used, the CRB-based comparative genomics method produced long and distinct CRBs that are as large as 22.9 Mb. We also demonstrated efficiency in detecting functionally useful target loci by using indel markers, each of which represents a CRB. We further showed that the CRB method is generally applicable to both monocot and dicot crops, by analyzing publicly available genomes of 31 soybeans and 23 rice accessions.

Resequencing data is actively used for searching QTL or analyzing genetic diversity in the crops. However, the complexity of genome, caused by genome duplication, limits the utility of genome-wide association studies and linkage analyses to identify genes that regulate agronomically valuable traits. Here, we propose a comparative genomics approach based on core or common variation-based recombination blocks (CRB) using single nucleotide variation (SNV) density information. We found that the soybean genomes are assembled with long and distinct CRBs as large as 10Mb. CRB-based comparative genomics enabled us to accurately identify recombination blocks at the whole-chromosome level. We identified the Ih locus that determines the yellow hilum color in soybeans using CRB-based mapping with representative indel markers. These results suggest that the CRB-based comparison method is a promising platform for molecular breeding and map-based cloning.