Serge Filatov

Baylor College of Medicine | BCM · Department of Pediatrics

Has anyone seen anything like this? The female Ornithodoros turicata engorged on a mouse and this is how I found it after taking off the animal. Normally this doesn't happen and nothing protrudes from the genital opening after a female tick is fed. My guess is this is a pathology of some kind. Perhaps because of the internal pressure generated by the sucking action the vestibular vagina prolapsed/everted somehow... Any ideas?

Several papers describe a modified DNA isolation protocol with the common DNeasy Blood & Tissue Kit, which introduce an additional step of incubation at 70 °C for 10 min after adding the AL buffer and before adding 100% ethanol (e.g. here ).

I was wondering why such additional step is needed? Is that a "trick" to increase DNA yield from a source where it is expected to be reasonably low? I have read that the AL buffer contains guanidine hydrochloride, which is helping in denaturing proteins. So, could it be that the incubation at increased temperature further aids this process? Any other ideas as to what this additional step might be doing to the sample?

I am trying to extract some information (metadata) from GenBank using the R package "rentrez" and the example I found here https://ajrominger.github.io/2018/05/21/gettingDNA.html. Specifically, for my group of interest, I search for all records that have geographical coordinates and then want to extract data about the accession number, taxon, sequenced locus, country, lat_long, and collection date. As an output, I want a csv file with the data for each record in a separate row. I am attaching the script I have constructed and it seems it can do the job but at some point, rows get muddled with data from different records overlapping the neighbouring rows. For example, from the 157 records that rentrez retrieves from NCBI the first 109 records in the resulting file look like what I want to achieve but the rest is a total mess. I suspect this happens because the XML contents differ a bit between the GenBank entries but cannot figure out how to fix the problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated because I am a newbie with R and figuring out each step takes a lot of time. Thanks in advance!

Hello everyone,

I would appreciate any hints on the identity of this male Mesostigmata. The specimen is badly damaged but looks very peculiar and hopefully can be recognized at least to the family level. The mite was taken from a bat (Plecotus auritus) in Ukraine but does not look like any species in Macronyssidae or Laelepidae I have seen so far.

I am querying the GenBank and getting different numbers when compare searches in R (rentrez package) to the Nucleotide db at NCBI website.

For example, entrez_search(db="nuccore", term = "Argasidae[Organism]") returns 29044 hits while the web search gives 29109. What I have noticed is that this happens not all the time. Querries with low numbers of hits return the same number, e.g. when I try Otobius [Organism]. I think this is strange, especially given that the db is supposed to be the same.

Any ideas why this is happening and how to deal with such an issue?

It seems there are so many species names, especially outside Western Europe and European ex-USSR (e.g. Turkey, Caucasus, Middle East)! I wonder if there is a single concise compendium on this topic to refer too. If such a thing exists, would anyone be so kind to share a copy?

Say we have a patient who had a septicemia, had been treated with antibiotics and completely recovered. Some 6 months later we have decided to look at serology and have taken blood samples from the patient. Would it be appropriate to call the serum from these samples convalescent?