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Animal Models

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Methods

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Division of Comparative Medicine

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Assessment of Various Standard Fish Diets on Gut Microbiome of Platyfish Xiphophorus maculatus

Soria et al., Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B. 2023.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jez.b.23218

Diet is an important factor affecting experimental reproducibility and data integration across studies. Reference diets for nontraditional animal models are needed to control diet-induced variation. In a study of the dietary impacts on the gut microbiome, researchers found that switching from a custom diet to a zebrafish diet altered the Xiphophorus gut microbiome. Their findings suggest that diets developed specifically for zebrafish can affect gut microbiome composition and might not be optimal for Xiphophorus. Supported by ORIP (R24OD011120, R24OD031467, P40OD011021) and NCI.

High-Resolution Genomes of Multiple Xiphophorus Species Provide New Insights into Microevolution, Hybrid Incompatibility, and Epistasis

Lu et al., Genome Research. 2023.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37147111/

Existing Xiphophorus genome assemblies are not at the chromosomal level and are prone to sequence gaps, hindering advancement of evolutionary, comparative, and translational biomedical studies. Investigators assembled high-quality chromosome-level genome assemblies for three distantly related Xiphophorus species. They found that expanded gene families and positively selected genes associated with live bearing. Positively selected gene families were enriched in nonpolymorphic transposable elements, suggesting that dispersal has accompanied the evolution of the genes, possibly by incorporating new regulatory elements. The investigators also characterized interspecific polymorphisms, structural variants, and polymorphic transposable element insertions and assessed their association to interspecies hybridization-induced gene expression dysregulation related to specific disease states in humans. Supported by ORIP (R24OD011120, R24OD031467, R24OD011198) and NCI.