Environment Animals Pets Dogs This deadly dog'spaghetti' has ancient origins Heartworm is one of the most widespread dog parasites. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Every year, millions of dogs come face-to-face with a life threatening parasite coiled up inside one of their vital organs--heartworm. The spaghetti-looking parasite can be fatal when left untreated. New research into the widespread canine parasite suggests that heartworm has a deeper and more complex history than scientists previously believed and some may have originated in Australian dingoes.

Places with "ton" in their name, such as Shitterton in Dorset, are said to be the most archetypically English Attempting to uncover the ancient origins of English place names has long kept academics and hobbyists busy, with each name often attracting multiple conflicting ideas. Now, artificial intelligence offers a way to analyse the names' similarities to a host of other European languages, revealing hints about their roots.

Park et al. question one out of seven findings from Hadzipasic et al.: whether TPX2 allosterically regulates the oldest Aurora. We had already addressed the two concerns raised--sparse sequence sampling and not forcing the gene to the species tree--before publication. Moreover, we believe their ancestral sequence reconstruction would be consistent with a nonallosteric common ancestor, and we show large sequence differences caused by species tree–enforced gene trees. The key findings in Hadzipasic et al. (1) are that (i) autophosphorylation is the ancient allosteric regulation for Aurora kinases; (ii) a gradual increase in allosteric activation took place during the holozoan evolution; (iii) an allosteric network in Aurora exists that, when mutated, alters allosteric activity; (iv) allosteric activation by TPX2 is entirely encoded in the kinase; (v) the interface between Aurora and TPX2 is co-conserved; (vi) evolution of specificity in signaling happens on binding affinity; and (vii) the oldest ancestral Aurora is not allosterically activated by TPX2. Notably, even though the ASR calculations differ, we believe the outcome is consistent with, rather than contradicting, the finding. The two concerns raised are (i) the small number of modern sequences used in the ASR calculations and (ii) the mismatch between the gene tree and the species tree.