Montclair, NJ (PRWEB) December 18, 2014 Robert Meredith, an assistant professor of biology and molecular biology at Montclair State University has long wondered whether teeth were lost in the common ancestor of all living birds, or whether they were lost convergently in several independent bird lineages. Meredith is a lead author of Evidence for Tooth Loss and the Acquisition of a Horny Beak in the Common Avian Ancestor, a report published in the December 12, 2014 issue of Science that concludes that the common ancestor of all living birds lost its teeth approximately 116 million years ago. Toothless vertebrates including birds, turtles and a few groups of mammals, such as anteaters and baleen whales, have all descended from ancestors with enamel-capped teeth. Aardvarks, sloths and armadillos are mammals whose teeth lack enamel. Modern birds, which evolved from toothed theropod dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus Rex, use a horny beak and a muscular gizzard instead of teeth to grind up and process their food. "For the past several years, I have been involved in Avian Genome Working Group, an international collaboration of more than a hundred investigators and dozens of universities and museums, said Meredith. The group has been sequencing and analyzing … Continue reading →

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 18-Dec-2014 Contact: Charles Cadieu cadieu@mit.edu 516-220-0119 PLOS Primates visually recognise and determine the category of an object even at a brief glance, and to date, this behaviour has been unmatched by artificial systems. A study publishing this week in PLOS Computational Biology has found that the latest artificial "deep neural network" performs as well as the primate brain at object recognition. Charles Cadieu and colleagues from MIT measured the brain's object recognition ability by implanting arrays of electrodes in the inferior temporal cortex of macaques. This allowed the researchers to see the neural representation -- the population of neurons that respond -- for every object that the animals looked at. When comparing these results with representations created by the deep neural networks, the accuracy of the model was determined by whether it grouped similar objects into similar clusters within the representation. This improved understanding of how the primate brain works could lead to better artificial intelligence and provide insight into understanding primate visual processing. "The fact that the models predict the neural responses and the distances of objects in neural population space shows that these models encapsulate our current best understanding as to what is going on … Continue reading →

Contact Information Available for logged-in reporters only University of Toronto researchers from Engineering, Biology and Medicine teach computers to read the human genome and rate likelihood of mutations causing disease, opening vast new possibilities for medicine Newswise (Toronto, ON Dec. 18) In the decade since the genome was sequenced in 2003, scientists and doctors have struggled to answer an all-consuming question: Which DNA mutations cause disease? A new computational technique developed at the University of Toronto may now be able to tell us. A Canadian research team led by professor Brendan Frey has developed the first method for ranking genetic mutations based on how living cells read DNA, revealing how likely any given alteration is to cause disease. They used their method to discover unexpected genetic determinants of autism, hereditary cancers and spinal muscular atrophy, a leading genetic cause of infant mortality. Their findings appear in todays issue of the leading journal Science. Think of the human genome as a mysterious text, made up of three billion letters. Over the past decade, a huge amount of effort has been invested into searching for mutations in the genome that cause disease, without a rational approach to understanding why they cause disease, … Continue reading →