Beringian origins and cryptic speciation events in the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria)

Amanita muscaria sensu lato has a wide geographic distribution, occurring in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and North, Central and South America. Previous phylogenetic work by others indicates three geographic clades (i.e. 'Eurasian', 'Eurasian-alpine' and 'North American' groups) within A. muscaria. However, the historical dispersal patterns of A. muscaria remained unclear. In our project, we collected specimens from arctic, boreal and humid temperate regions in Alaska, and generated DNA sequence data from the protein-coding beta-tubulin gene and the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) and large subunit (LSU) regions of the ribosomal DNA repeat. Homologous sequences from additional A. muscaria isolates were downloaded from GenBank. We conducted phylogenetic and nested clade analyses (NCA) to reveal the phylogeographic history of the species complex. Although phylogenetic analyses confirmed the existence of the three above-mentioned clades, representatives of all three groups were found to occur sympatrically in Alaska, suggesting that they represent cryptic phylogenetic species with partially overlapping geographic distributions rather than being allopatric populations. All phylogenetic species share at least two morphological varieties with other species, suggesting ancestral polymorphism in pileus and wart colour pre-dating their speciations. The ancestral population of A. muscaria likely evolved in the Siberian-Beringian region and underwent fragmentation as inferred from NCA and the coalescent analyses. The data suggest that these populations later evolved into species, expanded their range in North America and Eurasia. In addition to range expansions, populations of all three species remained in Beringia and adapted to the cooling climate.

Effects of training on attention to acoustic cues

Learning new phonetic categories in a second language may be thought of in terms of learning to focus one's attention on those parts of the acoustic-phonetic structure of speech that are phonologically relevant in any given context. As yet, however, no study has demonstrated directly that training can shift listeners' attention between acoustic cues given feedback about the linguistic phonetic category alone. In this paper we discuss the results of a training study in which subjects learned to shift their attention from one acoustic cue to another using only category-level identification as feedback. Results demonstrate that training redirects listeners' attention to acoustic cues and that this shift of attention generalizes to novel (untrained) phonetic contexts.

Hemispheric involvement in the perception of syntactic prosody is dynamically dependent on task demands

The first aim of this study was to determine if there was a significant perceptual asymmetry for syntactic prosody and if it differed from the perceptual asymmetry for emotional prosody. The second aim of this study was to determine if the observed asymmetries were the product of task demands or stimulus features. Experiment 1 consisted of a Syntactic task and an Emotional task. In the Syntactic task, subjects identified Statement and Question prosody in dichotically presented sentences. In the Emotional task, subjects identified Angry and Sad prosody in dichotically presented sentences. There was a significant left ear advantage for the Emotional task and no significant ear advantage for the Syntactic task. In Experiment 2, subjects had to perform an Emotional prosody task with the syntactic Statement and Question prosody stimuli from Experiment 1. There was a significant left ear advantage, indicating that the perceptual asymmetry was determined by task demands and not stimulus features.

A physical map of 30,000 human genes

A map of 30,181 human gene-based markers was assembled and integrated with the current genetic map by radiation hybrid mapping. The new gene map contains nearly twice as many genes as the previous release, includes most genes that encode proteins of known function, and is twofold to threefold more accurate than the previous version. A redesigned, more informative and functional World Wide Web site (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genemap) provides the mapping information and associated data and annotations. This resource constitutes an important infrastructure and tool for the study of complex genetic traits, the positional cloning of disease genes, the cross-referencing of mammalian genomes, and validated human transcribed sequences for large-scale studies of gene expression.

Characterization of short tandem repeats from thirty-one human telomeres

Completion of genetic and physical maps requires markers from the ends (telomeres) of every human chromosome. We have searched for short tandem repeats (microsatellites) in cosmid and P1 clones and generated 661 sequence-tagged sites (STS) from the terminal 300 kb of 31 human chromosome ends. PCR assays were successfully designed for 58 microsatellites and mapped both genetically and on radiation hybrids (RHs) to confirm their telomeric location. Sequence analysis revealed marked variation in sequence composition, consistent with the hypothesis that even very highly GC-rich chromosome bands (the T bands) are not homogenous. The STSs that we have generated will be a necessary resource for the construction of physical maps of these complex regions of the genome.

A gene map of the human genome

The human genome is thought to harbor 50,000 to 100,000 genes, of which about half have been sampled to date in the form of expressed sequence tags. An international consortium was organized to develop and map gene-based sequence tagged site markers on a set of two radiation hybrid panels and a yeast artificial chromosome library. More than 16,000 human genes have been mapped relative to a framework map that contains about 1000 polymorphic genetic markers. The gene map unifies the existing genetic and physical maps with the nucleotide and protein sequence databases in a fashion that should speed the discovery of genes underlying inherited human disease. The integrated resource is available through a site on the World Wide Web at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SCIENCE96/.

Cellular and molecular events in a newly organizing lateral root meristem

Spontaneous or auxin-induced lateral root formation in radish and Arabidopis provides an efficient system in which to examine molecular and cellular events associated with the initiation of a new meristem. Subtracted cDNA libraries made at different times in lateral root initiation were used as a source of genes that are expressed differentially during this developmental process, and expression studies on a small gene family of ribosomal protein genes were conducted. From analysis of cell division patterns in pericycle cells the number of founder cells for lateral roots was established. By the use of in vitro growth assays lateral root formation was determined to be a two-stage process. First a primordium is formed, and subsequently a subset of primordial cells begins to function as the lateral root apical meristem. This mode of root development has implications for pattern formation in newly organizing organs.

Formation of lateral root meristems is a two-stage process

In both radish and Arabidopsis, lateral root initiation involves a series of rapid divisions in pericycle cells located on the xylem radius of the root. In Arabidopsis, the number of pericycle cells that divide to form a primordium was estimated to be about 11. To determine the stage at which primordia are able to function as root meristems, primordia of different stages were excised and cultured without added hormones. Under these conditions, primordia that consist of 2 cell layers fail to develop while primordia that consist of at least 3–5 cell layers develop as lateral roots. We hypothesize that meristem formation is a two-step process involving an initial period during which a population of rapidly dividing, approximately isodiametric cells that constitutes the primordium is formed, and a subsequent stage during which meristem organization takes place within the primordium.

Processing interactions between segmental and suprasegmental information in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese

The processing interactions between segmental and suprasegmental information in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese were investigated in a speeded classification task. Since in Chinese, unlike in English, tones convey lexically meaningful information, native speakers of these languages may process combinations of segmental and suprasegmental information differently. Subjects heard consonant-vowel syllables varying on a consonantal (segmental) dimension and either a Mandarin Chinese or constant-pitch (non-Mandarin) suprasegmental dimension. The English listeners showed mutual integrality with the Mandarin Chinese stimuli, but not the constant-pitch stimuli. The native Chinese listeners processed these dimensions with mutual integrality for both the Mandarin Chinese and the constant-pitch stimuli. These results were interpreted in terms of the linguistic function and the structure of suprasegmental information in Chinese and English. The results suggest that the way listeners perceive speech depends on the interaction between the structure of the signal and the processing strategies of the listener.

Perceptual learning of synthetic speech produced by rule

To examine the effects of stimulus structure and variability on perceptual learning, we compared transcription accuracy before and after training with synthetic speech produced by rule. Subjects were trained with either isolated words or fluent sentences of synthetic speech that were either novel stimuli or a fixed list of stimuli that was repeated. Subjects who were trained on the same stimuli every day improved as much as did the subjects who were given novel stimuli. In a second experiment, the size of the repeated stimulus set was reduced. Under these conditions, subjects trained with repeated stimuli did not generalize to novel stimuli as well as did subjects trained with novel stimuli. Our results suggest that perceptual learning depends on the degree to which the training stimuli characterize the underlying structure of the full stimulus set. Furthermore, we found that training with isolated words only increased the intelligibility of isolated words, although training with sentences increased the intelligibility of both isolated words and sentences.

Phonological priming in auditory word recognition

Cohort theory, developed by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978), proposes that a "cohort" of all the words beginning with a particular sound sequence will be activated during the initial stage of the word recognition process. We used a priming technique to test specific predictions regarding cohort activation in three experiments. In each experiment, subjects identified target words embedded in noise at different signal-to-noise ratios. The target words were either presented in isolation or preceded by a prime item that shared phonological information with the target. In Experiment 1, primes and targets were English words that shared zero, one, two, three, or all phonemes from the beginning of the word. In Experiment 2, nonword primes preceded word targets and shared initial phonemes. In Experiment 3, word primes and word targets shared phonemes from the end of a word. Evidence of reliable phonological priming was observed in all three experiments. The results of the first two experiments support the assumption of activation of lexical candidates based on word-initial information, as proposed in cohort theory. However, the results of the third experiment, which showed increased probability of correctly identifying targets that shared phonemes from the end of words, did not support the predictions derived from the theory. The findings are discussed in terms of current models of auditory word recognition and recent approaches to spoken-language understanding.

Some effects of training on the perception of synthetic speech

The present study was conducted to determine the effects of training on the perception of synthetic speech. Three groups of subjects were tested with synthetic speech using the same tasks before and after training. One group was trained with synthetic speech. A second group went through the identical training procedures using natural speech. The third group received no training. Although performance of the three groups was the same prior to training, significant differences on the post-test measures of word recognition were observed: the group trained with synthetic speech performed much better than the other two groups. A six-month follow-up indicated that the group trained with synthetic speech displayed long-term retention of the knowledge and experience gained with prior exposure to synthetic speech generated by a text-to-speech system.