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Genome wide association studies in cancer are used to understand the heritable genetic contribution to disease risk. Here, the authors perform a genome wide association study in European patients with acute myeloid leukemia and identify loci associated with risk of developing the disease.

Over the last 40 years the gray wolf (Canis lupus) re-colonized its historical range in Italy increasing human-predator interactions. However, temporal and spatial trends in wolf mortality, including direct and indirect persecution, were never summarized. This study aims to fill this gap by focusing on the situation of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna regions, hosting a significant proportion of the Italian wolf population, by: (i) identifying the prevalent causes of wolf mortality, (ii) summarizing their temporal and spatial patterns and (iii) applying spatially-explicit Generalized Linear Models to predict wolf persecution. Between October 2005 and February 2021, 212 wolf carcasses were collected and subjected to necropsy, being involved in collisions with vehicles (n = 104), poisoned (n = 45), wounded with gunshot (n = 24) or blunt objects (n = 4) and being hanged (n = 2). The proportion of illegally killed wolves did not increase through time. Most persecution events occurred between October and February. None of our candidate models outperformed a null model and covariates such as the density of sheep farms, number of predations on livestock, or human density were never associated to the probability of having illegally killed wolves, at the municipal scale. Our findings show that conventional correlates of wolf persecution, combined with a supposedly high proportion of non-retrieved carcasses, fail to predict illegal wolf killings in areas where the species have become ubiquitous. The widespread spatial distribution of illegal killings indicates that persecution probably arises from multiple kinds of conflicts with humans, beyond those with husbandry. Wolf conservation in Italy should thus address cryptic wolf killings with multi-disciplinary approaches, such as shared national protocols, socio-ecological studies, the support of experts’ experience and effective sampling schemes for the detection of carcasses.

The gray wolf (Canis lupus) expanded its distribution in Europe over the last few decades. To better understand the extent to which wolves could re-occupy their historical range, it is important to test if anthropization can affect their fitness-related traits. After having accounted for ecologically relevant confounders, we assessed how anthropization influenced i) the growth of wolves during their first year of age (n = 53), ii) sexual dimorphism between male and female adult wolves (n = 121), in a sample of individuals that had been found dead in Italy between 1999 and 2021. Wolves in anthropized areas have a smaller overall variation in their body mass, during their first year of age. Because they already have slightly higher body weight at 3-5 months, possibly due to the availability of human-derived food sources. The difference in the body weight of adult females and males slightly increases with anthropization. However, this happens because of an increase in the body mass of males only, possibly due to sex-specific differences in dispersal and/or to "dispersal phenotypes". Anthropization in Italy does not seem to have any clear, nor large, effect on the body mass of wolves. As body mass is in turn linked to important processes, like survival and reproduction, our findings indicates that wolves could potentially re-occupy most of their historical range in Europe, as anthropized landscapes do not seem to constrain such of an important life-history trait. Wolf management could therefore be needed across vast spatial scales and in anthropized areas prone to social conflicts.