Species comparison in horses involves examining the physiological, anatomical, and behavioral differences and similarities between horses and other animal species. This area of study can provide insights into the evolutionary adaptations and ecological roles of horses. Researchers often focus on aspects such as digestive systems, locomotion, sensory capabilities, and social structures to understand how horses have evolved to meet their environmental and survival needs. Comparative studies may also explore genetic differences and similarities, contributing to a broader understanding of species evolution and adaptation. This page aggregates peer-reviewed research and scholarly articles that analyze various aspects of species comparison involving horses, highlighting significant findings and methodologies used in the field.
Wallis N, Raffan E.Obesity is one of the most prevalent health conditions in humans and companion animals globally. It is associated with premature mortality, metabolic dysfunction, and multiple health conditions across species. Obesity is, therefore, of importance in the fields of medicine and veterinary medicine. The regulation of adiposity is a homeostatic process vulnerable to disruption by a multitude of genetic and environmental factors. It is well established that the heritability of obesity is high in humans and laboratory animals, with ample evidence that the same is true in companion animals. In this r...
Librado P, Orlando L.The equid family contains only one single extant genus, , including seven living species grouped into horses on the one hand and zebras and asses on the other. In contrast, the equine fossil record shows that an extraordinarily richer diversity existed in the past and provides multiple examples of a highly dynamic evolution punctuated by several waves of explosive radiations and extinctions, cross-continental migrations, and local adaptations. In recent years, genomic technologies have provided new analytical solutions that have enhanced our understanding of equine evolution, including the spe...
Autry JM, Karim CB, Perumbakkam S, Finno CJ, McKenzie EC, Thomas DD, Valberg SJ.Ca regulation in equine muscle is important for horse performance, yet little is known about this species-specific regulation. We reported recently that horse encode unique gene and protein sequences for the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) Ca-transporting ATPase (SERCA) and the regulatory subunit sarcolipin (SLN). Here we quantified gene transcription and protein expression of SERCA and its inhibitory peptides in horse gluteus, as compared to commonly-studied rabbit skeletal muscle. RNA sequencing and protein immunoblotting determined that horse gluteus expresses the gene (SERCA1) as the predomin...
Vorobieva NV, Makunin AI, Druzhkova AS, Kusliy MA, Trifonov VA, Popova KO, Polosmak NV, Molodin VI, Vasiliev SK, Shunkov MV, Graphodatsky AS.A growing number of researchers studying horse domestication come to a conclusion that this process happened in multiple locations and involved multiple wild maternal lines. The most promising approach to address this problem involves mitochondrial haplotype comparison of wild and domestic horses from various locations coupled with studies of possible migration routes of the ancient shepherds. Here, we sequenced complete mitochondrial genomes of six horses from burials of the Ukok plateau (Russia, Altai Mountains) dated from 2.7 to 1.4 thousand years before present and a single late Pleistocen...
Tong L, Stewart M, Johnson I, Appleyard R, Wilson B, James O, Johnson C, McGreevy P.The current project aims to build on knowledge of the nociceptive capability of equine skin to detect superficial acute pain, particularly in comparison to human skin. Post-mortem samples of gluteal skin were taken from men ( = 5) and women ( = 5), thoroughbreds and thoroughbred types (mares, = 11; geldings, = 9). Only sections that contained epidermis and dermis through to the hypodermis were analysed. Epidermal depth, dermal depth and epidermal nerve counts were conducted by a veterinary pathologist. The results revealed no significant difference between the epidermal nerve counts of human...
Babenko VV, Millard A, Kulikov EE, Spasskaya NN, Letarova MA, Konanov DN, Belalov IS, Letarov AV.The viromes of the mammalian lower gut were shown to be heavily dominated by bacteriophages; however, only for humans were the composition and intervariability of the bacteriophage communities studied in depth. Here we present an ecogenomics survey of dsDNA bacteriophage diversity in the feces of horses (), comparing two groups of stabled horses, and a further group of feral horses that were isolated on an island. Our results indicate that the dsDNA viromes of the horse feces feature higher richness than in human viromes, with more even distribution of genotypes. No over-represented phage geno...
Sreenivasan CC, Thomas M, Wang D, Li F.While the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) continues to wreak havoc, there is little known about the susceptibility of the livestock and companion animals relative to humans. Here, we explore the susceptibility of companion and agricultural animals, in light of the existing information on natural infections, experimental infections, serosurveillance, and in vitro protein-homology binding interaction studies of the SARS-CoV-2 with the proposed receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 from diverse animal species.
Rosa B.Xenobiotic transport proteins play an important role in determining drug disposition and pharmacokinetics. Our understanding of the role of these important proteins in humans and pre-clinical animal species has increased substantially over the past few decades, and has had an important impact on human medicine; however, veterinary medicine has not benefitted from the same quantity of research into drug transporters in species of veterinary interest. Differences in transporter expression cause difficulties in extrapolation of drug pharmacokinetic parameters between species, and lack of knowledg...
Davis KU, Sheats MK.Asthma is a common and debilitating chronic airway disease that affects people and horses of all ages worldwide. While asthma in humans most commonly involves an excessive type 2 immune response and eosinophilic inflammation, neutrophils have also been recognized as key players in the pathophysiology of asthma, including in the severe asthma phenotype where neutrophilic inflammation predominates. Severe equine asthma syndrome (sEAS) features prominent neutrophilic inflammation and has been increasingly used as a naturally occurring animal model for the study of human neutrophilic asthma. This...
Packard GC.I re-examined published data for ontogenetic change in relative mass of the brain in six species of mammal (i.e., sheep, pig, cow, horse, rat, cat) to illustrate an insidious problem with conventional analyses of brain-body allometry. Graphical displays of logarithmic transformations of the original data for each species give the appearance of two discrete mathematical distributions, but untransformed observations nonetheless conform to a single distribution that is well described by a single, nonlinear equation. The concept of biphasic, allometric growth by the brain consequently is an artifa...
Su Y, Zhu J, Salman S, Tang Y.The development of the induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) technology has revolutionized the world on the establishment of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) across a great variety of animal species. Generation of iPSCs from domesticated animals would provide unrestricted cell resources for the study of embryonic development and cell differentiation of these species, for screening and establishing desired traits for sustainable agricultural production, and as veterinary and preclinical therapeutic tools for animal and human diseases. Induced PSCs from domesticated animals thus harbor enormous sc...
The most common musculoskeletal conditions reported in donkeys are related to the foot. Radiographic examinations are clinically important in the diagnosis of foot abnormalities and are commonly used. However, few studies have been conducted to establish the normal radiographic appearance of a donkey's foot. To determine the radiographic features of the front digit in healthy Amiata donkeys. Radiographic examinations were performed on 56 forefeet of 28 Amiata donkeys. Three radiographic views of each front foot were taken: lateromedial, dorsopalmar and dorso-65°proximal/palmarodistal oblique....
Sanz MG, Schnider DR, Mealey KA.Relative to other species, horses seem particularly susceptible to oxidative stress. Plasma albumin plays an important role in preventing oxidative damage, in part due to its methionine (MET) content. Equine albumin is highly unusual in that it contains no MET residues. Whether or not this causes deficient antioxidant capacity in equine plasma relative to that of other species has not yet been explored. The objective of this study was to compare the redox status of equine (no MET) to that of bovine (moderate amount of MET) plasma. Plasma was collected from healthy, nonpregnant Quarter Horse ma...
Santos Alves J, da Silva Anjos M, Silva Bastos M, Sarmento Martins de Oliveira L, Pereira Pinto Oliveira I, Batista Pinto LF....Equid breeds originating from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa are believed to have genetically contributed to the formation of breeds and ecotypes from Brazil. The country has numerous breeds and ecotypes of horses and donkeys but there are no extensive studies on maternal genetic diversity and their origins. This study reports the results of the first genetic analysis of all horse and donkey breeds/ecotypes from Brazil based on sequences of the mitochondrial DNA control region (D-loop) whose main objective was to characterize the genetic variation in these animals. These analyses will ...
Bellaw JL, Nielsen MK.Cyathostomins infect virtually all horses, and concomitant infections with 10 or more species per horse is standard. Species-specific knowledge is limited, despite potential species bias in development of disease and anthelmintic resistance. This is the first meta-analysis to examine effects of geographical region and cyathostomin collection method on reported composition of cyathostomin communities. Methods: Thirty-seven articles published in English in 1975 or later, in which adults of individual species were systematically enumerated, were included. Seven regions; North America, South Ameri...
Contreras-Aguilar MD, Tvarijonaviciute A, Monkeviciene I, Martín-Cuervo M, González-Arostegui LG, Franco-Martínez L, Cerón JJ, Tecles F....Measurement of adenosine deaminase (ADA) can provide information about cell-mediated immunity. This report's objective was to study the enzymatic activity of total ADA (tADA) and its isoenzymes ADA1 and ADA2 in canine, equine, porcine, and bovine serum and saliva and their changes in different inflammatory situations in each species. Besides, an automated method for ADA2 measurement was developed and validated. Results: tADA was present in serum and saliva of healthy animals of the four species. Erythro-9-(2-hydroxy-3-nonyl) adenine (EHNA) concentration of 0.47 mM was needed for ADA1 inhibit...
Dittmer KE, Heathcott RW, Marshall JC, Azarpeykan S.The aim of this preliminary study was to determine the relative expression of phosphatonin pathway-related genes in normal dog, sheep and horse kidneys and to explore the relationships between the different genes. Kidneys were collected post-mortem from 10 sheep, 10 horses and 8 dogs. RNA was extracted, followed by reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction for fibroblast growth factor receptor 1 IIIc (), sodium-phosphate co-transporter () 1 (), (), (), parathyroid hormone 1 receptor (), klotho (), vitamin D receptor (), 1a-hydroxylase () and 24-hydroxylase (). was highly ...
Gómez-Torres F, Ballesteros-Acuña L, Ruíz-Sauri A.Atrioventricular node is responsible for delaying the passage of the electrical impulse to ventricles in order to protect them from fast depolarizations coming from the atria. The importance of this study is to identify the morphological variations of the components of atrioventricular zone that affect the conduction system and its clinical relationship in different species of mammals. We analyzed ten human hearts, nine from horses, eight from pigs, and five from dogs without a clinical history of cardiac pathologies. Histological section thickness of 5 μm were obtained with a microtome and ...
Klumplerova M, Splichalova P, Oppelt J, Futas J, Kohutova A, Musilova P, Kubickova S, Vodicka R, Orlando L, Horin P.The mammalian Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) is a genetic region containing highly polymorphic genes with immunological functions. MHC class I and class II genes encode antigen-presenting molecules expressed on the cell surface. The MHC class II sub-region contains genes expressed in antigen presenting cells. The antigen binding site is encoded by the second exon of genes encoding antigen presenting molecules. The exon 2 sequences of these MHC genes have evolved under the selective pressure of pathogens. Interspecific differences can be observed in the class II sub-region. The family E...
Karagianni AE, Lisowski ZM, Hume DA, Scott Pirie R.The mononuclear phagocyte system (MPS) is a family of cells of related function that includes bone marrow progenitors, blood monocytes and resident tissue macrophages. Macrophages are effector cells in both innate and acquired immunity. They are a major resident cell population in every organ and their numbers increase in response to proinflammatory stimuli. Their function is highly regulated by a wide range of agonists, including lymphokines, cytokines and products of microorganisms. Macrophage biology has been studied most extensively in mice, yet direct comparisons of rodent and human macro...
Hulliger MF, Pacholewska A, Vargas A, Lavoie JP, Leeb T, Gerber V, Jagannathan V.Severe equine asthma is an incurable obstructive respiratory condition affecting 10-15% of horses in temperate climates. Upon exposure to airborne antigens from hay feeding, affected horses show neutrophilic airway inflammation and bronchoconstriction, leading to increased respiratory effort. The resulting implications range from welfare concerns to economic impacts on equestrian sports and horse breeding. Immunological and pathophysiological characteristics of severe equine asthma show important parallels with allergic and severe neutrophilic human asthma. Our study aimed at investigating reg...
Orlando L.The domestication of the horse some 5,500 years ago followed those of dogs, sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs by ∼2,500-10,000 years. By providing fast transportation and transforming warfare, the horse had an impact on human history with no equivalent in the animal kingdom. Even though the equine sport industry has considerable economic value today, the evolutionary history underlying the emergence of the modern domestic horse remains contentious. In the last decade, novel sequencing technologies have revolutionized our capacity to sequence the complete genome of organisms, including from arch...
Liu C, Lei H, Ran X, Wang J.The Guizhou pony (GZP) is an indigenous species of equid found in the mountains of the Guizhou province in southwest China. We selected four regions of the equine leukocyte antigen (ELA), including , , and and used them to assess the diversity of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II gene using direct sequencing technology. had the lowest / ratio (0.560) compared with the other three loci, indicating that was conserved and could be conserved after undergoing selective processes. Nine , five , nine and seven codons were under significant positive selection at the antigen b...
Cappellato A, Miletto Petrazzini ME, Bisazza A, Dadda M, Agrillo C.The perception of different size illusions is believed to be determined by size-scaling mechanisms that lead individuals to extrapolate inappropriate 3D information from 2D stimuli. The Muller-Lyer illusion represents one of the most investigated size illusions. Studies on non-human primates showed a human-like perception of this illusory pattern. To date, it is not clear whether non-primate mammals experience a similar illusory effect. Here, we investigated whether horses perceive the Muller-Lyer illusion by using their spontaneous preference for the larger portion of carrot. In control trial...
Lansade L, Colson V, Parias C, Reigner F, Bertin A, Calandreau L.Recent studies have demonstrated that horses can recognize humans based simply on visual information. However, none of these studies have investigated whether this involves the recognition of the face itself, or simply identifying people from non-complex external clues, such as hair color. To go beyond this we wanted to know whether certain features of the face were indispensable for this recognition (e.g., colors, hair or eyes). The 11 horses in this study had previously learned to identify four unfamiliar faces (portrait view and in color) presented repeatedly on a screen. We thus assessed w...
Saleh AG, El-Habashi N, Abd-Ellatieff HA, Abas OM, Anwar S, Fukushi H, Yanai T.Equine herpesvirus-9 (EHV-9), equine herpesvirus-1 (EHV-1) and zebra-borne EHV-1 are members of the family Herpesviridae and cause encephalitis and rhinopneumonitis in a range of animal species. The aim of this study was to characterize and compare the rhinopneumonitis induced by experimental intranasal inoculation of groups of hamsters with EHV-9, EHV-1 strain Ab4p or zebra-borne EHV-1 viruses. Animals inoculated with EHV-9 had earlier and more severe neurological and respiratory signs than those inoculated with EHV-1 strain Ab4p or zebra-borne EHV-1. At 4-5 days post inoculation (dpi), hamst...
Morandi L, Sabattini S, Renzi A, Rigillo A, Bettini G, Dervas E, Schauer A, Morandi M, Gissi DB, Tarsitano A, Evangelisti S, Tonon C.Ultra-conserved non-coding elements (UCNEs) are genomic sequences that exhibit > 95% sequence identity between humans, mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish. Recent findings reported their functional role in cancer. The aim of this study was to evaluate the DNA methylation modifications of UNCEs in squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) from different mammal species. Fifty SCCs from 26 humans, 17 cats, 3 dogs, 1 horse, 1 bovine, 1 badger, and 1 porcupine were investigated. Fourteen feline stomatitis and normal samples from 36 healthy human donors, 7 cats, 5 dogs, 5 horses, 2 bovines and 1 badger were c...
Gambini A, Duque Rodríguez M, Rodríguez MB, Briski O, Flores Bragulat AP, Demergassi N, Losinno L, Salamone DF.Several equids have gone extinct and many extant equids are currently considered vulnerable to critically endangered. This work aimed to evaluate whether domestic horse oocytes support preimplantation development of zebra embryos obtained by intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI, zebroid) and cloning, and to study the Hippo signaling pathway during the lineage specification of trophectoderm cells and inner cell mass cells. We first showed that zebra and horse sperm cells induce porcine oocyte activation and recruit maternal SMARCA4 during pronuclear formation. SMARCA4 recruitment showed to be...
Miró J, Gutiérrez-Reinoso M, da Silva JA, Fernandes C, Rebordão MR, Alexandre-Pires G, Catalán J, Ferreira-Dias G.Collagen fibers and inflammatory cells are the basis for jenny endometrium Kenney and Doig's classification developed for the mare. The infiltration of a large number of eosinophils in the jenny endometrium is intriguing. Eosinophil and fibroblast produced IL33, which has been related to fibrosis development and chronicity. This work on the endometrium consisted of (i) quantification of collagen type I (COL1A2), type III (COL3A1), and IL33 transcripts; (ii) histological localization and quantification of COL1 and COL3 proteins; and (iii) eosinophil and neutrophil count and correlation with col...
Goetting-Minesky MP, Makova KD.In mammals, males undergo a greater number of germline cell divisions compared with females. Thus, the male germline accumulates more DNA replication errors, which result in male mutation bias-a higher mutation rate for males than for females. The phenomenon of male mutation bias has been investigated mostly for rodents and primates, however, it has not been studied in detail for other mammalian orders. Here we sequenced and analyzed five introns of three genes (DBX/DBY, UTX/UTY, and ZFX/ZFY) homologous between X and Y chromosomes in several species of perissodactyls (horses and rhinos) and of...
Scior T, Alexander C, Zaehringer U.There is literature evidence gathered throughout the last two decades reflecting unexpected species differences concerning the immune response to lipid IVa which provides the opportunity to gain more detailed insight by the molecular modeling approach described in this study. Lipid IVa is a tetra-acylated precursor of lipid A in the biosynthesis of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in Gram-negative bacteria. Lipid A of the prototypic E. coli-type is a hexa-acylated structure that acts as an agonist in all tested mammalian species by innate immunorecognition via the Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4)/myeloid d...
Ishida N, Oyunsuren T, Mashima S, Mukoyama H, Saitou N.The noncoding region between tRNAPro and the large conserved sequence block is the most variable region in the mammalian mitochondrial DNA D-loop region. This variable region (ca. 270 bp) of four species of Equus, including Mongolian and Japanese native domestic horses as well as Przewalskii's (or Mongolian) wild horse, were sequenced. These data were compared with our recently published Thoroughbred horse mitochondrial DNA sequences. The evolutionary rate of this region among the four species of Equus was estimated to be 2-4 x 10(-8) per site per year. Phylogenetic trees of Equus species demo...
Garcia-Villar R, Toutain PL, Alvinerie M, Ruckebusch Y.The pharmacokinetic disposition of xylazine hydrochloride is described after both intravenous and intramuscular injection of a single dose, in four domestic species: horse, cattle, sheep and dog, by an original high performance liquid chromatographic technique. Remarkably small interspecific differences are reported. After intravenous administration, systemic half-life (t1/2 beta) ranged between 22 min (sheep) and 50 min (horse) while the distribution phase is transient with half-life (t1/2 alpha) ranging from 1.2 min (cattle) to 5.9 min (horse). The peak level of drug concentration in the pla...
Marín Navas C, Delgado Bermejo JV, McLean AK, León Jurado JM, Torres ARBYR, Navas González FJ.Genetic diversity and population structure were analyzed using the historical and current pedigree information of the Arabian (PRá), Spanish Purebred (PRE), and Hispano-Arabian (Há) horse breeds. Genetic diversity parameters were computed and a canonical discriminant analysis was used to determine the contributions of ancestor breeds to the genetic diversity of the Há horse. Pedigree records were available for 207,100 animals born between 1884 and 2019. Nei's distances and the equivalent subpopulations number indicated the existence of a highly structured, integrated population for the Há ...
Swinburne JE, Boursnell M, Hill G, Pettitt L, Allen T, Chowdhary B, Hasegawa T, Kurosawa M, Leeb T, Mashima S, Mickelson JR, Raudsepp T, Tozaki T....A genetic linkage map of the horse consisting of 742 markers, which comprises a single linkage group for each of the autosomes and the X chromosome, is presented. The map has been generated from two three-generation full-sibling reference families, sired by the same stallion, in which there are 61 individuals in the F2 generation. Each linkage group has been assigned to a chromosome and oriented with reference to markers mapped by fluorescence in situ hybridization. The average interval between markers is 3.7 cM and the linkage groups collectively span 2772 cM. The 742 markers comprise 734 mic...
Shi MW, Zhang NA, Shi CP, Liu CJ, Luo ZH, Wang DY, Guo AY, Chen ZX.Many animal species present sex differences. Sex-associated genes (SAGs), which have female-biased or male-biased expression, have major influences on the remarkable sex differences in important traits such as growth, reproduction, disease resistance and behaviors. However, the SAGs resulting in the vast majority of phenotypic sex differences are still unknown. To provide a useful resource for the functional study of SAGs, we manually curated public RNA-seq datasets with paired female and male biological replicates from the same condition and systematically re-analyzed the datasets using stand...
Ishida N, Hasegawa T, Takeda K, Sakagami M, Onishi A, Inumaru S, Komatsu M, Mukoyama H.The D-loop regions in equine mitochondrial DNA were cloned from three thoroughbred horses by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The total number of bases in the D-loop region were 1114 bp, 1115 bp and 1146 bp. The equine D-loop region is A/T rich like many other mammalian D-loops. The large central conserved sequence block and small conserved sequence blocks 1, 2 and 3, that are common to other mammals, were observed. Between conserved sequence blocks 1 and 2 there were tandem repeats of an 8 bp equine-specific sequence TGTGCACC, and the number of tandem repeats differed among individual horses....
Bellone RR, Liu J, Petersen JL, Mack M, Singer-Berk M, Drögemüller C, Malvick J, Wallner B, Brem G, Penedo MC, Lassaline M.Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is the most common cancer of the equine eye, frequently originating at the limbus, with the potential to invade the cornea, cause visual impairment, and result in loss of the eye. Several breeds of horses have a high occurrence of limbal SCC implicating a genetic basis for limbal SCC predisposition. Pedigree analysis in the Haflinger breed supports a simple recessive mode of inheritance and a genome-wide association study (N = 23) identified a 1.5 Mb locus on ECA12 significantly associated with limbal SCC (Pcorrected = 0.04). Sequencing the most physiologicall...
Kaiser TM, Fortelius M.A new approach of reconstructing ungulate diet, the mesowear method, was recently introduced by Fortelius and Solounias ([2000] Am Mus Novitat 3301:1-36). Mesowear is based on facet development on the occlusal surfaces of the teeth. Restricting mesowear investigation to maxillary cheek teeth would allow mesowear investigation only in assemblages of large numbers of individuals and therefore would generally restrict this method to relatively few assemblages of recent and fossil ungulates. Most of the fossil, subfossil, and recent ungulate osteological assemblages that may be assigned to a singl...
Wiedmeyer CE, Johnson PJ, Cohn LA, Meadows RL, Kerl ME, Tessman RK, Perlis J, DeClue AE.With the emergence of continuous glucose monitoring systems being used to provide a detailed glucose picture in humans, a commercially available system (CGMS(R), Medtronic Minimed, Northridge, CA) was examined for use in veterinary species. Methods: Adult, clinically normal horses (n = 7), cats (n = 3), dogs (n = 4), and cows (n = 5) were studied. Cats (n = 4), dogs (n = 5), and one horse with diabetes were included in the study. Several of the normal horses, including the horse with diabetes, and one cow were subjected to an intravenous glucose tolerance test. The CGMS was attached to each an...
Gao W, Chan Y, You M, Lacap-Bugler DC, Leung WK, Watt RM.This study explored the range of bacterial taxa present within healthy subgingival (below the gum-line) niches in the horse oral cavity using 16S rRNA gene amplicon pyrosequencing. Pooled subgingival plaque samples were collected from approximately 200 sulcus sites from two horses (EQ1, EQ2) for analysis. A total of 14,260 quality-filtered pyrosequencing reads were obtained, which were assigned to 3875 operational taxonomic units (OTUs; 99% identity cut-off); 1907 OTUs for EQ1 and 2156 OTUs for EQ2. Diverse taxa from 12 phyla were identified, including Actinobacteria (3.17%), Bacteroidetes (25...
Bressan FF, Bassanezze V, de Figueiredo Pessôa LV, Sacramento CB, Malta TM, Kashima S, Fantinato Neto P, Strefezzi RF, Pieri NCG, Krieger JE....Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have enormous potential in developmental biology studies and in cellular therapies. Although extensively studied and characterized in human and murine models, iPSCs from animals other than mice lack reproducible results. Herein, we describe the generation of robust iPSCs from equine and bovine cells through lentiviral transduction of murine or human transcription factors Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc and from human and murine cells using similar protocols, even when different supplementations were used. The iPSCs were analyzed regarding morphology, gene and...
Irvine KL, Hopkins LJ, Gangloff M, Bryant CE.TLR2 recognises bacterial lipopeptides and lipoteichoic acid, and forms heterodimers with TLR1 or TLR6. TLR2 is relatively well characterised in mice and humans, with published crystal structures of human TLR2/1/Pam3CSK4 and murine TLR2/6/Pam2CSK4. Equine TLR4 is activated by a different panel of ligands to human and murine TLR4, but less is known about species differences at TLR2. We therefore cloned equine TLR2, TLR1 and TLR6, which showed over 80% sequence identity with these receptors from other mammals, and performed a structure-function analysis. TLR2/1 and TLR2/6 from both horses and hu...
Amin TM, Sirs JA.A comparative study has been made of the blood rheology, and its component factors, in horse, sheep, cattle, goat, camel, pig, dog, rabbit and man. The erythrocyte flexibility of horse red cells is high relative to man, that of pig, dog, camel and rabbit comparable, but less flexible, and sheep, cattle and goat relatively inflexible. The erythrocyte flexibility of horse, sheep, cattle and goats does not vary with the plasma fibrinogen level, as occurs with human and rabbit cells. Washing erythrocytes and then suspending them in isotonic saline makes the erythrocytes of all species relatively i...
Song SD, Barker SC, Shao R.The genus Haematopinus contains 21 species of blood-sucking lice, parasitizing both even-toed ungulates (pigs, cattle, buffalo, antelopes, camels and deer) and odd-toed ungulates (horses, donkeys and zebras). The mitochondrial genomes of the domestic pig louse, Haematopinus suis, and the wild pig louse, Haematopinus apri, have been sequenced recently; both lice have fragmented mitochondrial genomes with 37 genes on nine minichromosomes. To understand whether the composition of mitochondrial minichromosomes and the gene content and gene arrangement of each minichromosome are stable within the g...
Johnson PJ, Wiedmeyer CE, Messer NT, Ganjam VK.There is growing recognition that obesity is common and represents a significant detriment to the health of companion animals in a manner similar to that by which it is affecting the human population. As is the case for other species, obesity appears to promote insulin resistance in horses and it is through this pathophysiological process that many of the adverse medical consequences of obesity are being characterized. Equine medical conditions that have been described in the context of obesity and insulin resistance differ from those in humans. Chronic human conditions that have been attribut...
Abdelgawad A, Hermes R, Damiani A, Lamglait B, Czirják GÁ, East M, Aschenborn O, Wenker C, Kasem S, Osterrieder N, Greenwood AD.Equine herpesvirus type 1 (EHV-1) causes respiratory disorders and abortion in equids while EHV-1 regularly causes equine herpesvirus myeloencephalopathy (EHM), a stroke-like syndrome following endothelial cell infection in horses. Both EHV-1 and EHV-9 infections of non-definitive hosts often result in neuronal infection and high case fatality rates. Hence, EHV-1 and EHV-9 are somewhat unusual herpesviruses and lack strict host specificity, and the true extent of their host ranges have remained unclear. In order to determine the seroprevalence of EHV-1 and EHV-9, a sensitive and specific pepti...
Binz T, Lebelt J, Niemann H, Hagenau K.By reverse transcriptase/PCR amplification and subsequent sequence determination of the p24 gene, the relatedness of Borna disease virus (BDV) in various naturally infected animal species was determined. These results are indicative of a common ancestral virus pool and a remarkably low species barrier of BDV. Comparison of 11 sequences to that of tissue culture adapted virus revealed that the homology among all isolates was at least 96.2% at the nucleotide level, and 97% at the amino acid level. Viral sequences from sheep, donkey and horse were found to be not more distantly related to each ot...
Blumer R, Maurer-Gesek B, Gesslbauer B, Blumer M, Pechriggl E, Davis-López de Carrizosa MA, Horn AK, May PJ, Streicher J, de la Cruz RR, Pastor ÁM.To test whether palisade endings are a general feature of mammalian extraocular muscles (EOMs). Methods: Thirteen species, some frontal-eyed (human, monkey, cat, and ferret), and others lateral-eyed (pig, sheep, calf, horse, rabbit, rat, mouse, gerbil, and guinea pig) were analyzed. Palisade endings were labeled by using different combinations of immunofluorescence techniques. Three-dimensional reconstructions of immunolabeled palisade endings were done. Results: In all frontal-eyed species, palisade endings were a consistent feature in the rectus EOMs. Their total number was high and they exh...
Elton D, Bryant N.Despite the availability of vaccines, equine influenza virus (EIV) continues to pose a threat to the racing industry. The virus spreads rapidly in unprotected populations and large scale outbreaks, such as those in South Africa in 2003 and Australia in 2007, can cost billions of pounds. Like other influenza viruses, EIV undergoes antigenic variation, enabling it to evade antibodies generated against previous infection or vaccination. The UK has an active surveillance programme to monitor antigenic drift and participates in an international collaboration with other countries in Europe, Japan an...
Martin F, Höglund J, Bergström TF, Karlsson Lindsjö O, Tydén E.The aims of this study were to determine the species of Parascaris present in foals in Sweden and to establish whether anthelmintic resistance to pyrantel and fenbendazole is present on Swedish stud farms. Ascarid eggs collected from different regions in Sweden were karyotyped and were all identified as Parascaris univalens, characterized by one chromosomal pair. Faecal egg count reduction tests were performed on a total of 142 foals on 9 farms between September 2016 and May 2017. Healthy foals with at least 150 eggs per gram faeces (EPG) were included in the study and treated with oral pastes...
Hung GC, Chilton NB, Beveridge I, Gasser RB.In this study, molecular data sets were used to address the controversies relating to the systematics of strongyloid nematodes of equids utilising morphological data sets. DNA sequences of the first and second internal transcribed spacers (ITS-1 and ITS-2) of ribosomal DNA were determined for 30 species of equine strongyles and the systematic relationships reconstructed using phenetic and phylogenetic tree-building methods. The molecular data provided support for the hypothesis that the genera with large subglobular buccal capsules are ancestral to those with small cylindrical buccal capsules,...
Legarra A, Croiseau P, Sanchez MP, Teyssèdre S, Sallé G, Allais S, Fritz S, Moreno CR, Ricard A, Elsen JM.With dense genotyping, many choices exist for methods to detect quantitative trait loci (QTL) in livestock populations. However, no across-species study has been conducted on the performance of different methods using real data. We compared three methods that correct for relatedness either implicitly or explicitly: linkage and linkage disequilibrium haplotype-based analysis (LDLA), efficient mixed-model association (EMMA) analysis, and Bayesian whole-genome regression (BayesC). We analyzed one chromosome in each of five datasets (dairy cattle, beef cattle, sheep, horses, and pigs) using real g...
Denny MW.Are there absolute limits to the speed at which animals can run? If so, how close are present-day individuals to these limits? I approach these questions by using three statistical models and data from competitive races to estimate maximum running speeds for greyhounds, thoroughbred horses and elite human athletes. In each case, an absolute speed limit is definable, and the current record approaches that predicted maximum. While all such extrapolations must be used cautiously, these data suggest that there are limits to the ability of either natural or artificial selection to produce ever fast...
Innes JF, Clegg P.Examples of naturally occurring musculoskeletal disorders are extremely common in veterinary species and provide a valuable comparative research resource, which can provide compelling comparative data on the aetiopathogenesis and treatment of many common human musculoskeletal diseases. In particular, orthopaedic diseases are a common morbidity in both dogs and horses. In this review, we give an overview of the common musculoskeletal diseases encountered in these species: for instance, tendon and ligament injuries, arthropathies and stress fractures, as well as an insight into the basic biology...
Edmunds DH, Whittaker DK, Green RM.The progress of artificial caries-like lesions created in human, bovine, equine, and ovine enamel has been studied. Lesions were produced by exposure to an acid gel system or by 5-day exposure to a sequential batch culture technique using Streptococcus mutans NCTC 10832. Longitudinal ground sections were prepared. The lesions were of similar appearance in all species when examined in polarized light. The depth in human enamel was approximately half that in the animal species. Microradiography confirmed subsurface demineralization in all four species. Similar depth ratios were seen in the scann...
