Monthly Archives: February 2017

This wild hog from Hawaii was raised at the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colo. Feral pigs in the wild tend to eat anything containing a calorie from rows of corn to sea turtle eggs, to baby deer and goats. Rae Ellen Bichell/NPR hide caption

This wild hog from Hawaii was raised at the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colo. Feral pigs in the wild tend to eat anything containing a calorie from rows of corn to sea turtle eggs, to baby deer and goats.

In the foothills of Colorado's Rocky Mountains, a gravel road leads to a 10-foot-tall fence. Type in a key code, and a gate scrapes open. Undo a chain to get behind another. Everything here is made of metal, because the residents of this facility are experts at invasion and destruction.

They're wild pigs, aka feral swine, wild hogs or Sus scrofa. And biologists at the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins have invented a promising new way to track the invasive animals by looking for tiny traces of them in mud and water.

Biologist Morgan Wehtje points to a boar who's asking her to scratch his bristled back. At 280 pounds, he weighs about as much as an NFL tight end. "His name is Makunakane, which means 'Big Papa' in Hawaiian," says Wehtje. The smaller pigs, like a female named Bobbie Socks, weigh about 150 pounds. They're dense and compact, says Wehtje, "which is why if they were to run at you they'd take you out."

They are opportunistic omnivores. If they get can their mouth around it and it has a calorie in it, they will eat it.

Jack Mayer, biologist, Savannah River National Laboratory

Wehtje and her colleagues study the biology and behavior of these pigs, which were raised in captivity. They're playing in the snow and scoping out the fence with their wet snouts. But their wild, much less cuddly counterparts are destroying the landscape in most U.S. states producing an estimated $1.5 billion in damage per year.

These animals will eat anything, from rows of corn to sea turtle eggs, to baby deer and goats.

"People don't realize that wild pigs are voracious predators," says Jack Mayer, a biologist with the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C., who has studied wild pigs for 40 years. "They will run down and kill and eat lamb, sheep, goats, calves, domestic chickens."

And more.

"Pigs will eat humans," says Mayer. "It's been documented in combat, remote area homicide situations and plane crashes. Pigs will go in and feed on human carcasses."

They are "opportunistic omnivores," Mayer says. "If they get can their mouth around it and it has a calorie in it, they will eat it."

In Texas, feral pigs are tearing up suburban yards. In Louisiana, they damaged levees by digging for food.

Pigs came to North America 500 years ago with early explorers as a source of food. Centuries later, the Eurasian wild boar was introduced to parts of the U.S. by sports hunters, and today's feral swine are "a combination of escaped domestic pigs, Eurasian wild boars, and hybrids of the two," according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Kelly Williams,of the National Wildlife Research Center, in Fort Collins, checks a sample of dirty water from Texas that she's about to analyze for bits of pig DNA. Rae Ellen Bichell/NPR hide caption

Kelly Williams,of the National Wildlife Research Center, in Fort Collins, checks a sample of dirty water from Texas that she's about to analyze for bits of pig DNA.

Once female wild pigs are about 6 months old or so, they can produce as many as a dozen offspring per year. For a number of reasons that haven't been completely nailed down, their populations have really exploded in the last 30 years, Mayer says. There are now at least 6 million wild pigs across the country, with established populations in 35 states.

State and federal legislators have funneled a lot of money into controlling and eliminating these animals because of the trail of destruction they leave behind. But controlling them can feel like an infuriating game of whack-a-mole, because they move a lot, reproduce quickly, and are smart enough to learn to avoid traps and bait. They're also sneaky.

"These things are very secretive," says Mayer. "A lot of people didn't know about wild pigs until they walked out their front door on Sunday morning and saw that it looked like somebody on drugs had rototilled their yard."

But the pigs may have met their match. Kelly Williams, a biological science technician at the National Wildlife Research Center, is going high-tech on these hogs.

She and her colleagues at the National Wildlife Research Center have recently developed a way to keep tabs on the animals without ever even laying eyes on them. All she needs is a scoop of water.

"So, for example, right now in New Mexico the forest service is out collecting water for me," says Williams. "All they have to do is carry around a little Nalgene bottle, scoop up a water sample and ship it back to me."

Pigs love water and mud. They drink it, play in it and roll in it to keep heat and bugs away. When they do, they leave bits of themselves behind drool, skin cells, hair and urine like a wildlife crime scene. Each of those bits contains pig DNA.

"We know pigs are pretty messy, dirty animals, so they might shed more DNA than a coyote lapping up water or something," Williams says.

She worked with wild pigs at the National Wildlife Research Center to identify these tiny bits of DNA called "environmental DNA," or eDNA which can sometimes be detectable up to a month after a pig has visited a site.

Ecologists have used eDNA to monitor invasive fish in the Great Lakes and endangered whale sharks in the Arabian Gulf. Williams' colleagues developed a version to track the presence of Burmese pythons in Florida. Wild pigs are one of the first land animals to be tracked so extensively using eDNA.

Williams starts with a bottle of dirty water, mixed with a solution to preserve the DNA inside.

"Sometimes it looks like chocolate milk," she says. "Sometimes it looks like lemonade."

Williams spins down all the solids in the liquid sample, amplifies the DNA inside, and compares what she finds to 125 base pairs of mitochondrial DNA that could only belong to a pig.

At the end, she gets an answer "Yes, pigs were here," or "No, they weren't." She then passes the results along to people like Brian Archuleta, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in New Mexico.

Archuleta has a goal for the new year: wild pig annihilation.

"Total elimination by the last day of September of this year," he says of his goal. Archuleta is not joking.

Researchers set up cameras in the wild in Texas to confirm that their test for pig DNA corresponded to visits by actual wild pigs. Courtesy of Kelly Williams/National Wildlife Research Center hide caption

Researchers set up cameras in the wild in Texas to confirm that their test for pig DNA corresponded to visits by actual wild pigs.

He covers eastern New Mexico, which is not only thousands of square miles of desert, mountains and sand dunes, but also right next to Texas, which is teeming with pigs (not to be confused with javelina, a smaller, unrelated species native to the Americas).

To track wild pigs in his region, Archuleta used to have to repeatedly send people out across deserts and mountains to place cameras, use dogs to sniff them out, and bait traps with tubes of corn.

"The eastern side of New Mexico is a big place lots of country. We are looking for a needle in a haystack," says Archuleta.

But recently, he just had a few people go out and collect water, and then shipped the samples to Kelly Williams. With the results he got back he was able to narrow the search to about 10 square miles in the desert, and another small area in the mountains.

Next, Archuleta booked a helicopter, hired some sharpshooters and flew over the areas where pig DNA had been found. They shot eight hogs in one place and 13 in another.

"There are unknown places in New Mexico that I'm sure have pigs that we just don't know about," he says.

He's hoping the new eDNA sampler will help him find every last one.

Meanwhile, Kelly Williams is already on to her next challenge. She's working on a way to use eDNA to track another elusive species the Nile monitor. These hissing, tail-whipping, 5-foot-long lizards are expanding their reach in Florida. They eat endangered owls for breakfast.

See the article here:
Scientists Get Down And Dirty With DNA To Track Wild Pigs - NPR

myfox8.com

Murdered jogger's family pushing for enhanced DNA testing myfox8.com Officials say Lewis confessed, providing detailed incriminating statements about the crime. His DNA, obtained through a voluntary cheek swab, matched that found under Vetrano's nails, on her phone, and on her back. If convicted, he faces 25 years to ... Police: DNA leads to arrest in strangling of NYC joggerUSA TODAY Suspect's DNA match to jogger lead to arrest: CopsFox5NY Howard Beach Jogger 'Helped Us Identify' Her Killer by Fighting Back: NYPDDNAinfo amNY -New York Daily News -New York Daily News all 225 news articles »

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Murdered jogger's family pushing for enhanced DNA testing - myfox8.com

High cholesterol isnt good for us

CMEABG-UCBL-Chapon/Phanie/Science Photo Library

By Michael Le Page

A one-off injection could one day lower your cholesterol levels for the rest of your life.

People born with natural mutations that disable a specific gene have a lower risk of heart disease, with no apparent side effects. Now a single injection has successfully disabled this same gene in animal tests for the first time.

This potential treatment would involve permanently altering the DNA inside some of the cells of a persons body, so doctors will have to be sure it is safe before trying it in people. But the benefits could be enormous. In theory, it could help millions live longer and healthier lives.

The results of the animal study were described by Lorenz Mayr, of pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, at a genomics meeting in London on 1 February. Mayr, who leads the companys research into a DNA editing technique called CRISPR, wouldnt say whether AstraZeneca plans to pursue this approach, but he was clearly excited as he presented the findings.

The idea would be to do it as a one-off, he later told New Scientist. It should be permanent.

Heart attacks and strokes kill a quarter of people living in rich nations, and high levels of bad LDL cholesterol in the blood greatly increases the risk. For this reason, millions of people now take statins to lower their LDL cholesterol levels. While statins undoubtedly extend the lives of many people, some experience side effects such as muscle pain, leading drug companies to look for alternative treatments.

In 2005, it was discovered that a few people naturally have very low cholesterol levels, thanks to mutations that prevent their livers from making a protein called PCSK9. They have a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease and no apparent side effects whatsoever, says Gilles Lambert at the University of Reunion Island, who studies PCSK9.

The PCSK9 protein normally circulates in the blood, where it degrades a protein found on the surface of blood vessels. This second protein removes LDL cholesterol from the blood: the faster it is degraded by PCSK9, the higher a persons cholesterol levels. But people who lack PCSK9 due to genetic mutations have more of this LDL-removal protein, and therefore less cholesterol in their blood.

To mimic this effect, two companies have developed approved antibodies that remove the PCSK9 protein from the blood. These are very effective at lowering cholesterol and no serious side effects have been reported so far, Lambert says. It is yet to be shown if they reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, but the first trial results are due to be announced in March.

However, the antibody drugs are extremely expensive and need to be injected every two to four weeks, so even if the antibodies work as well as hoped, they cannot be dished out to millions like statins. All attempts to develop conventional drugs to block PCSK9 have failed.

But gene editing provides a radical alternative. Using the CRISPR technique, the team at AstraZeneca have disabled human versions of the PCSK9 gene in mice.

They did this by injecting the CRISPR Cas 9 protein and a guiding RNA sequence into the animals. The RNA guide helps the Cas9 protein bind to a specific site in the gene. It then cuts the gene at that point, and when the break is repaired, errors that disable the gene are likely to be introduced.

There was an even bigger fall in cholesterol levels in the mice given the CRISPR treatment than in those injected with the antibody drugs.

This gene editing approach would be a closer mimic of what happens in people born with PCSK9-disabling mutations than injecting antibodies, says pharmacologist Patricia McGettigan of Queen Mary University of London, who has looked at the safety of PCSK9 therapies. That might actually be really productive, she says.

The big worry about using gene editing to alter DNA inside the body is that it could also cause unintended off-target mutations. In the worst case, these could turn cells cancerous.

Mayr says the team has tested for off-target effects in 26 different tissues in the mice, and that the results will be published soon. Its very promising in terms of safety, he told New Scientist.

Whats more, the CRISPR method is constantly being improved. Other teams have developed modified versions of the CRISPR protein that are so precise off-target effects occur no more often than natural mutations in cells. Even so, Lambert thinks human trials are at least a decade away. For now its very far-fetched, he says.

An alternative approach that should have fewer off-target effects would be to use modified forms of the CRISPR protein to switch off the PCSK9 gene without altering its DNA. Instead of changing the genome, this kind of editing targets the epigenome instead the chemical tags added to DNA that influence how active particular genes are.

Many think epigenome editing will prove more useful than conventional genome editing for treating diseases. I think the future is CRISPR 3.0 and 4.0, Mayr says, referring to epigenome editing.

More on these topics:

See the article here:
Injection could permanently lower cholesterol by changing DNA - New Scientist

wtkr.com

Who are you: New in-home DNA testing unlocks family secrets wtkr.com NORFOLK, Va. - We all come from somewhere in this great big world. But, how many of us really know just where that "somewhere" is? For my mother's side of the family, it's Italy and France. Growing up, there was always great cooking in our home. And ...

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Who are you: New in-home DNA testing unlocks family secrets - wtkr.com