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The African livestock sector plays a key role in improving the livelihoods of people through the supply of food, improved nutrition and consequently health. However, its impact on the economy of the people and contribution to national GDP is highly variable and generally below its potential. This study was conducted to assess the current state of livestock phenomics and genetic evaluation methods being used across the continent, the main challenges, and to demonstrate the effects of various genetic models on the accuracy and rate of genetic gain that could be achieved. An online survey of livestock experts, academics, scientists, national focal points for animal genetic resources, policymakers, extension agents and animal breeding industry was conducted in 38 African countries. The results revealed 1) limited national livestock identification and data recording systems, 2) limited data on livestock production and health traits and genomic information, 3) mass selection was the common method used for genetic improvement with very limited application of genetic and genomic-based selection and evaluation, 4) limited human capacity, infrastructure, and funding for livestock genetic improvement programmes, as well as enabling animal breeding policies. A joint genetic evaluation of Holstein-Friesian using pooled data from Kenya and South Africa was piloted. The pilot analysis yielded higher accuracy of prediction of breeding values, pointing to possibility of higher genetic gains that could be achieved and demonstrating the potential power of multi-country evaluations: Kenya benefited on the 305-days milk yield and the age at first calving and South Africa on the age at first calving and the first calving interval. The findings from this study will help in developing harmonized protocols for animal identification, livestock data recording, and genetic evaluations (both national and across-countries) as well as in designing subsequent capacity building and training programmes for animal breeders and livestock farmers in Africa. National governments need to put in place enabling policies, the necessary infrastructure and funding for national and across country collaborations for a joint genetic evaluation which will revolutionize the livestock genetic improvement in Africa.

Information on phenotypic and morphometric variation is important in the characterisation of indigenous cattle breeds. The objective of this study was to assess the morphological variation of the indigenous Angone, Landim, and Tete cattle breeds of Mozambique, kept under traditional management systems. These breeds are farmed mainly for meat and draught power, although they can produce some milk, especially the Landim. Data were collected through a survey of twenty-three villages in Maputo, Gaza, Inhambane (southern Mozambique), and Tete (central Mozambique) provinces. A total of 614 heads of adult animals including 140 Angone, 292 Landim, and 182 Tete were sampled. The collected qualitative and quantitative data were examined using SPSS version 16. The dominant coat pattern was even (no spotting) (59.5 %), with black being the most common coat colour (51.5 %), followed by light brown (26.5 %). The three breeds showed morphological differentiation based on size, body weight, and horn shape. Landim males and females were significantly (p

The Nguni cattle breed has distinct populations that are adapted to the different ecological zones of Southern Africa. This study was carried out to assess genetic diversity and establish the relationships among South African (SA), Mozambican (Landim), and Swazi Nguni cattle populations, using 25 microsatellite markers. Genotypic data were generated from deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) samples of 90 unrelated individuals of the three cattle populations, collected from government conservations and stud herds. DNA profiles of five local beef breeds were used as the reference populations. Most of the 25 microsatellite markers were highly polymorphic across the studied populations, with an overall polymorphic information content (PIC) mean of 0.676. Genetic diversity within populations was high with expected heterozygosity varying from 0.705 ± 0.024 (Landim) to 0.748 ± 0.021 (SA Nguni) and mean number of alleles being highest in the SA Nguni (7.52 ± 0.42). Average observed heterozygosity (0.597 ± 0.046) compared to the expected heterozygosity (0.719 ± 0.022) was lowest for the Swazi Nguni, which also had a high number of Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE) deviated loci (13), confirming the relatively high level of inbreeding (0.158 ± 0.058) in that population. Analysis of molecular variance revealed only 9.61% of the total variation between the populations and 90.39% within populations. A short genetic distance (0.299) was observed between Landim and Swazi Nguni, with the SA Nguni (> 0.500) being the most genetically distant population. The distant relationship between SA Nguni and the other two Nguni cattle populations was further confirmed by a principal coordinates analysis. The three Nguni populations clustered independently from each other, despite some evidence of admixture. Therefore, it can be concluded that SA Nguni, Landim, and Swazi Nguni populations in Southern Africa exhibit high levels of genetic diversity and are genetically distant; with the two latter populations being less genetically apart. These results present useful information for the development of strategies for regional management of animal genetic resources, through conservation and sustainable utilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research on older men’s constructions and experiences of masculinity has gained scholarly attention from the humanistic, medical, and social sciences, much of the debates tend to focus on experiences from contexts in the global North. The current study draws on the everyday experiences of fifteen older men in a rural setting in northwestern Ghana to foreground a critical understanding of the multiple ways in which ageing, and masculinities are experienced, challenged and negotiated on a daily basis. Our findings highlight the links between everyday experiences, gendered subjectivities, and culturally normative constructions of manhood. The participants of the study perceive ageing as a major setback to achieving hegemonic masculine status and based on the limitations it places on them, they conceptualise alternative notions of masculinity. These alternative ways of theorising hegemonic masculinity among older men focus on wisdom, experience and mentorship rather than independence, virility and emotionless as pervasive in contemporary discourses on masculinities.

Most academic scholarships, particularly from the global North continue to theorize African men, especially poor black men as problematic, abusive, and violent. Such scholarship often fails to foreground how men’s gendered subjectivities are likely to be shaped by intersecting inequalities. The danger of such neglect is that African men continue to be pathologised as being unable to cope with western liberal conception of gender equality. Drawing on interviews with young men in northwestern Ghana, our findings highlight those young men may construct masculinities and femininities in ways that reproduce harmful gender norms, relations, and power inequalities. Despite the problematic constructions of gender, the narratives of participants appear to offer some potential in imagining alternative masculine discourses which reject and resist hegemonic masculine ideals. Based on this, we argue that a sincere appreciation of how young men may progress towards imagining progressive masculine subjectivities ought to develop clearer understandings of the ambiguities, ambivalences, and conflicting appeals of multiple voices of masculinities.

Calls to engage community leaders in preventing gender-based violence against women have gained global prominence in recent years. Situated within the growing calls for greater community leaders’ engagement, this article problematizes the assumptions that efforts to mobilize community gatekeepers in violence prevention are likely to yield better results. Drawing inspiration from decolonial African feminist perspectives coupled with five focus group discussions conducted with 30 community leaders in the patriarchal setting of Northwestern Ghana, this article highlights the potential limitations of these assumptions by paying attention to the multiple ways; albeit subtly, in which community leaders as cultural gatekeepers may individually or collectively reproduce and sustain dominant cultural tropes that normalize violence against women. Our findings show that cultural gatekeepers’ perspectives on and their approaches to addressing violence against women risk normalizing and perpetuating it. If policy makers, development practitioners, and researchers are to adequately address the violence of men, a useful starting point is to build on community leaders’ perspectives, attitudes, and responses to violence as a collective issue. By building on these, we will be able to challenge and deconstruct the multiple ways in which community leaders’ approaches to addressing violence are reinforcing gendered subordination.

Current nosology claims to separate mental disorders into distinct categories that do not overlap with each other. This nosological separation is not based on underlying pathophysiology but on convention-based clustering of qualitative symptoms of disorders which are typically measured subjectively. Yet, clinical heterogeneity and diagnostic overlap in disease symptoms and dimensions within and across different diagnostic categories of mental disorders is huge. While diagnostic categories provide the basis for general clinical management, they do not describe the underlying neurobiology that gives rise to individual symptomatic presentations. The ability to incorporate neurobiology into the diagnostic framework and to stratify patients accordingly will be a critical step forward for the development of new treatments for mental disorders. Furthermore, it will also allow physicians to provide patients with a better understanding of their illness's complexities and management. To realize this ambition, a paradigm shift is needed to build an understanding of how neuropsychiatric conditions can be defined more precisely using quantitative (multimodal) biological processes and markers and thus to significantly improve treatment success. The ECNP New Frontiers Meeting 2024 set out to develop a consensus roadmap for building a new diagnostic framework for mental disorders by discussing its rationale, outlook, and consequences with all stakeholders involved. This framework would instantiate a set of principles and procedures by which research could continuously improve precision diagnostics while moving away from traditional nosology. In this meeting report, the speakers' summaries from their presentations are combined to address three key elements for generating such a roadmap, namely, the application of innovative technologies, understanding the biology of mental illness, and translating biological understanding into new approaches. In general, the meeting indicated a crucial need for a biology-informed framework to establish more precise diagnosis and treatment for mental disorders to facilitate bringing the right treatment to the right patient at the right time., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest MJHK, DHM, MH, and BC declare no conflict of interest. SH is member of the scientific advisory boards for Johnson and Johnson (formerly Janssen) and F-Prime Capital, and he is member of the Boards of Directors for Voyager Therapeutics, Cyclerion Therapeutics, and Vesalius Therapeutics. LMW discloses the following patents in which she contributed, namely, US Patent App. 16/921,388, 16/368,774, 10,702,232 B2, 15/997,631, 10,285,658, 15/830,338, 10,034,645. LJdP declared consultancy and paid presentations for Boeringer-Ingelheim, paid presentation for Viatris – all outside the current work. LJdP is also the Co-chair of the ECNP Immuno-NeuroPsychiatry Network. CML is SAB for Myriad Neuroscience. Speaker & Consultancy fees from UCB and SYNLAB. AE receives salary and equity from Alto Neuroscience, and equity from Akili Interactive. PAL has received honoraria for talks presented at educational meetings organised by Boehringer-Ingelheim outside of the presented work. QJMH has obtained fees and options for consultancies for Aya Technologies and Alto Neuroscience. HM is a full-time employee of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH., (Copyright © 2024. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Whole-report working memory tasks provide a measure of recall for all stimuli in a trial and afford single-trial analyses that are not possible with single-report delayed estimation tasks. However, most whole-report studies assume that trial stimuli are encoded and reported independently, and they do not consider the relationships between stimuli presented and reported within the same trial. Here, we present the results of two independently conducted whole-report experiments. The first dataset was recorded by Adam, Vogel, and Awh (2017) and required participants to report color and orientation stimuli using a continuous response wheel. We recorded the second dataset, which required participants to report color stimuli using a set of discrete buttons. We found that participants often group their reports by color similarity, contradicting the assumption of independence implicit in most encoding models of working memory. Next, we showed that this behavior was consistent across participants and experiments when reporting color but not orientation, two circular variables often assumed to be equivalent.Finally, we implemented an alternative to independent encoding where stimuli are encoded as a hierarchical Bayesian ensemble and found that this model predicts biases that are not present in either dataset. Our results suggest that assumptions made by both independent and hierarchical ensemble encoding models-which were developed in the context of single-report delayed estimation tasks-do not hold for the whole-report task. This failure to generalize highlights the need to consider variations in task structure when inferring fundamental principles of visual working memory.

Background: Chronic infection with Toxoplasma gondii (TOXO) results in microcysts in the brain that are controlled by inflammatory activation and subsequent changes in the kynurenine pathway. TOXO seropositivity is associated with a heightened risk of schizophrenia (SCZ) and with cognitive impairments. Latency of the acoustic startle response, a putative index of neural processing speed, is slower in SCZ. SCZ subjects who are TOXO seropositive have slower latency than SCZ subjects who are TOXO seronegative. We assessed the relationship between kynurenine pathway metabolites and startle latency as a potential route by which chronic TOXO infection can lead to cognitive slowing in SCZ. Methods: Fourty-seven SCZ subjects and 30 controls (CON) were tested on a standard acoustic startle paradigm. Kynurenine pathway metabolites were measured using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry were kynurenine (KYN), tryptophan (TRYP), 3-hydroxyanthranilic acid (3-OHAA), anthranilic acid (AA), and kynurenic acid (KYNA). TOXO status was determined by IgG ELISA. Results: In univariate ANCOVAs on onset and peak latency with age and log transformed startle magnitude as covariates, both onset latency [F (1,61) = 5.76; p = 0.019] and peak latency [F (1,61) = 4.34; p = 0.041] were slower in SCZ than CON subjects. In stepwise backward linear regressions after stratification by Diagnosis, slower onset latency in SCZ subjects was predicted by higher TRYP (B = 0.42; p = 0.008) and 3-OHAA:AA (B = 3.68; p = 0.007), and lower KYN:TRYP (B = -185.42; p = 0.034). In regressions with peak latency as the dependent variable, slower peak latency was predicted by higher TRYP (B = 0.47; p = 0.013) and 3-OHAA:AA ratio (B = 4.35; p = 0.010), and by lower KYNA ( B = -6.67; p = 0.036). In CON subjects neither onset nor peak latency was predicted by any KYN metabolites. In regressions stratified by TOXO status, in TOXO positive subjects, slower peak latency was predicted by lower concentrations of KYN (B = -8.08; p = 0.008), KYNA (B = -10.64; p = 0.003), and lower KYN:TRYP ratios (B = -347.01; p = 0.03). In TOXO negative subjects neither onset nor peak latency was predicted by any KYN metabolites. Conclusions: KYN pathway markers predict slowing of startle latency in SCZ subjects and in those with chronic TOXO infection, but this is not seen in CON subjects nor TOXO seronegative subjects. These findings coupled with prior work indicating a relationship of slower latency with SCZ and TOXO infection suggest that alterations in KYN pathway markers may be a mechanism by which neural processing speed, as indexed by startle latency, is affected in these subjects., (Copyright © 2020 Pearce, Massa, Goldsmith, Gandhi, Hankus, Alrohaibani, Goel, Cuthbert, Fargotstein, Barr, Panuwet, Brown and Duncan.)