Contagious caprine pleuropneumonia is an infectious and contagious disease affecting goats and wildlife ruminants, mostly in Africa and Asia. It is caused by a mycoplasma,
Mycoplasma capricolum
susbp.
capripneumoniae
, which is very fastidious. This may be the reason why there are few reports of its isolation and characterization. This study describes the development of a whole genome typing strategy based on sequencing reads assemblies on a reference genome (Abomsa, GenBank accession LM995445) and extraction of informative single nucleotide polymorphism. FASTA sequences inferred from the variant calling files were used to establish a comprehensive phylogenetic tree based on 2880 SNPs. This tree included a total of 34 strains originating from all the regions where CCPP has been detected, as well as strains isolated from wildlife. A recent isolate from West-Niger was positioned closely to another 1995 East-Niger isolate, an indication that CCPP may be extending westward in Africa. Six 2013 Tanzanian isolates had identical sequences in spite of diverse geographical origins. This could be explained by the clonal expansion of a virulent strain at that time in East Africa. Although all strains isolated from wildlife in the Middle East were in the same phylogenetic group, this may not sign an adaptation to new hosts. The most probable explanation for wildlife contamination remains the contact with goats. This strategy will easily accommodate new data in the near future and should become a gold-standard high-resolution typing procedure for the surveillance of contagious caprine pleuropneumonia.
Behavioural phenotypes are sometimes studied in the context of brain circuits and in correspondence to the underlying genotype of individual organisms. Thus, allelic variants of ion channels can alter memory performance by changing Ca +2 ion influx in neurons (Tang et al., 1999); or variants of oxytocin receptors can change bonding strength between sexual pairs (Young et al., 1999). The relationship between genotypes and behaviour is not always linear. For example, rats can be selectively bred to perform maze-running tasks. But the consequence of such artificial selection depends on the rearing environment of the selected lines (Cooper & Zubek, 1958). The 'maze-bright' and 'maze-dull' lines remain plainly different in the standard laboratory environment. At the same time, the difference vanishes if both groups are reared in an enriched sensory environment, demonstrating contingency and flexibility of the behaviour in the prevailing environment. Flexibility in these cases represents not a simple correspondence between genotype and behaviour but an environment-dependent conditionality in the form of an if-then-else algorithm. Epigenetic machinery provides another critical source of
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