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The effect of breed on milk components—fat, protein, lactose, and water—has been observed to be significant. As fat is one of the major price-determining factors for milk, exploring the variations in fat QTLs across breeds would shed light on the variable fat content in their milk. Here, on whole-genome sequencing, 25 differentially expressed hub or bottleneck fat QTLs were explored for variations across indigenous breeds. Out of these, 20 genes were identified as having nonsynonymous substitutions. A fixed SNP pattern in high-milk-yielding breeds in comparison to low-milk-yielding breeds was identified in the genes GHR, TLR4, LPIN1, CACNA1C, ZBTB16, ITGA1, ANK1, and NTG5E and, vice versa, in the genes MFGE8, FGF2, TLR4, LPIN1, NUP98, PTK2, ZTB16, DDIT3, and NT5E. The identified SNPs were ratified by pyrosequencing to prove that key differences exist in fat QTLs between the high- and low-milk-yielding breeds.

The systematic disappearance of individuals is very much a global phenomenon. In Pakistan, this phenomenon re-emerged after Pakistan decided to get involved in the U.S.-led 'war on terror' in the wake of 9/11. This paper exposes the politics of necropolitics in Pakistan through art, as death plays a significant role in setting up a political change. I contend that Ramla Fatima's artworks put a human face to death and speak truth to power, to draw on Foucault, interlinking death with politics to expose the hiding and camouflaging of death in Pakistan. Fatima's artworks represent another episode of the genocide continuum in Pakistan – the unending enforced disappearances and the sufferings of the families of the laapata – the disappeared. By painting necropolitics, she transgresses the silencing culture, a legacy of enforced disappearances. Through art, she illustrates how victims and their families are condemned to a state of subalternity and ambiguity – ambiguous loss, slow violence and torture, and psychological scars. Her artworks also draw attention to the role of expressive art in evoking awareness of human rights violations and establishing the fact that the laapata's lives matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Shoaib Mansoor's cult feminist trilogy—Khuda Kay Liye (2007), Bol (2011), Verna (2017)—to demonstrate how his transgressive heroines transgress myths of femininity, for example, those pertaining to Otherness, division, and the eternal feminine. Mansoor features transgressive heroines who transcend the patriarchal boundaries structured to contain them and challenge the voice of male authority. His heroines' transgressions thus take agency as the driving force for pursuing self-fulfilment in transcendence, undermining the domineering traits of patriarchy embedded in the status quo and herd values. The article adumbrates Pakistani cinema's transitional odyssey from women as docile bodies to transcendent agents by analyzing heroines' portrayals in traditional Pakistani cinema. I argue that Mansoor's feminist trilogy significantly contributes to women's cinema by addressing the audience as a woman and concerning with women. As Mansoor persuasively features transgressive heroines, watching the feminist trilogy as counter-narrative provides us with the representation of women as social subjects whose transformative actions destabilize discursive formations, accomplish transcendence, and create a space of woman empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brucellosis is the most frequent zoonotic disease worldwide, with over 500,000 new human infections every year. Brucella melitensis, the most virulent species in humans, primarily affects goats and the zoonotic transmission occurs by ingestion of unpasteurized milk products or through direct contact with fetal tissues. Brucellosis is endemic in India but no information is available on population structure and genetic diversity of Brucella spp. in India. We performed multilocus sequence typing of four B. melitensis strains isolated from naturally infected goats from India. For more detailed genetic characterization, we carried out whole genome sequencing and comparative genome analysis of one of the B. melitensis isolates, Bm IND1. Genome analysis identified 141 unique SNPs, 78 VNTRs, 51 Indels, and 2 putative prophage integrations in the Bm IND1 genome. Our data may help to develop improved epidemiological typing tools and efficient preventive strategies to control brucellosis.

A comprehensive transcriptome assembly of chickpea has been developed using 134.95 million Illumina single-end reads, 7.12 million single-end FLX/454 reads and 139,214 Sanger expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from >17 genotypes. This hybrid transcriptome assembly, referred to as Cicer arietinumTranscriptome Assembly version 2 (CaTA v2, available at http://data.comparative-legumes.org/transcriptomes/cicar/lista_cicar-201201), comprising 46,369 transcript assembly contigs (TACs) has an N50 length of 1,726 bp and a maximum contig size of 15,644 bp. Putative functions were determined for 32,869 (70.8%) of the TACs and gene ontology assignments were determined for 21,471 (46.3%). The new transcriptome assembly was compared with the previously available chickpea transcriptome assemblies as well as to the chickpea genome. Comparative analysis of CaTA v2 against transcriptomes of three legumes - Medicago, soybean and common bean, resulted in 27,771 TACs common to all three legumes indicating strong conservation of genes across legumes. CaTA v2 was also used for identification of simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and intron spanning regions (ISRs) for developing molecular markers. ISRs were identified by aligning TACs to the Medicago genome, and their putative mapping positions at chromosomal level were identified using transcript map of chickpea. Primer pairs were designed for 4,990 ISRs, each representing a single contig for which predicted positions are inferred and distributed across eight linkage groups. A subset of randomly selected ISRs representing all eight chickpea linkage groups were validated on five chickpea genotypes and showed 20% polymorphism with average polymorphic information content (PIC) of 0.27. In summary, the hybrid transcriptome assembly developed and novel markers identified can be used for a variety of applications such as gene discovery, marker-trait association, diversity analysis etc., to advance genetics research and breeding applications in chickpea and other related legumes.

Open source single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) discovery pipelines for next generation sequencing data commonly requires working knowledge of command line interface, massive computational resources and expertise which is a daunting task for biologists. Further, the SNP information generated may not be readily used for downstream processes such as genotyping. Hence, a comprehensive pipeline has been developed by integrating several open source next generation sequencing (NGS) tools along with a graphical user interface called Integrated SNP Mining and Utilization (ISMU) for SNP discovery and their utilization by developing genotyping assays. The pipeline features functionalities such as pre-processing of raw data, integration of open source alignment tools (Bowtie2, BWA, Maq, NovoAlign and SOAP2), SNP prediction (SAMtools/SOAPsnp/CNS2snp and CbCC) methods and interfaces for developing genotyping assays. The pipeline outputs a list of high quality SNPs between all pairwise combinations of genotypes analyzed, in addition to the reference genome/sequence. Visualization tools (Tablet and Flapjack) integrated into the pipeline enable inspection of the alignment and errors, if any. The pipeline also provides a confidence score or polymorphism information content value with flanking sequences for identified SNPs in standard format required for developing marker genotyping (KASP and Golden Gate) assays. The pipeline enables users to process a range of NGS datasets such as whole genome re-sequencing, restriction site associated DNA sequencing and transcriptome sequencing data at a fast speed. The pipeline is very useful for plant genetics and breeding community with no computational expertise in order to discover SNPs and utilize in genomics, genetics and breeding studies. The pipeline has been parallelized to process huge datasets of next generation sequencing. It has been developed in Java language and is available at http://hpc.icrisat.cgiar.org/ISMU as a standalone free software.

This paper is focused on Shoaib Mansoor's feminist film, Bol (2011), seen as a commentary on religious "absolute explanatory schemes."1 Arguing that the film demonstrates how Pakistani patriarchy maneuvers sacred texts to construct comforting illusions for women, this paper uses the theory of Islamic Feminism to unravel the politics of religious interpretation and the discursive influence of Islamic fundamentalism. It notes that the protagonist's inner conflict is a transgressional act and dragoons her into disrupting socio-religious boundaries. The paper also examines the film's confessional nature, exposing gender inequalities and injustices exercised through self-authorized religious dogma. Viewers of Bol enter a journey not only through the nodi that confront women and plague contemporary enunciations of Islam, but also through heterogeneous forms of iniquitous oppression, systematic bigotry, forced marriage, and endemic violence. The article concludes that by bridging the gulf between Islam and feminism, women's rights movements can be effective in the Islamic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]