Archival Repositories Research Articles

PERFORMING BRITISH VIOLENCE IN THE NIGERIAN MIDWEST: ABMED YERIMA’S THE TRIALS OF OBA OVONRAMWEN AND THE “NARRATIVES” OF HISTORY

Theatre and its appurtenances can project events, problems and issues of society. Its hegemony consists in performances and varied possibilities of expression with great propensity to awaken social consciousness stimulate emotions, and provide certain 'experiences' to invent a 'new' future. This paper takes a look at one of such experiences through a critical appraisal of the stage performance of Ahmed Yerima's Trials of Oba Ovonramwen as presented at the Chinua Achebe Arts Theatre, University of Calabar. Invoking Elizabeth Wessling’s Writing History as a Prophet , this paper argues that the political perspective of the narrator or writer conditions the many versions of history. The politics and poetics of performance as established by Augusto Boal in many of his works suggest that history need not be written by the oppressor alone but can be subject to the re-writing and re-interpretation of the “vanquished”. In the case of Ahmed Yerima’s Trials of Oba Ovonramwen , the interpretation of history is both a creative and critical process in which the act of narration itself becomes a “symbolic” one through which past misrepresentations can be subject to critiques and re-readings. In addition to revisiting the version of this episode of “British Punitive Expedition” to the Benin Kingdom in 1897, this paper submits that through performance the oppressed can not only recuperate his/her history but also re-inscribe the correct(ed) version into the annals of global politics and archival repository.

ACTUAL PROBLEMS OF RECEIVING SERVICES IN THE MODE OF DIGITALIZATION IN THE FIELD OF CIRCULATION OF MEDICINES

This scientific article is devoted to the current problems of obtaining services in the mode of digitalization in the field of circulation of medicines. The main directions of introduction of the digitalization process in the sphere of medicines circulation in Ukraine are revealed, the attention is focused on the positive and negative moments of digitalization in the sphere of medicines circulation in Ukraine. Possible areas for improving digitalization in the field of circulation of medicines in Ukraine are identified, as well as the need to improve the legal regulation of digitalization in the field of circulation of medicines in Ukraine in order to protect the rights and interests of recipients of services in the field of medicines. The material and technical support of this process remains an urgent issue in the development of the digitalization process in the field of medicines circulation in Ukraine. Yes, it should be noted that a significant part of the territory of Ukraine does not have a proper Internet connection. This circumstance complicates or even makes digitalization impossible throughout Ukraine, and the territorial feature is the main one, because digitalization should be available in every smallest settlement of Ukraine. Only then can we talk about the success of the digitalization reform in the field of medicines in Ukraine. According to the results of registration activities in the field of circulation of medicines, the central executive body, which directly formulates and ensures the implementation of state policy in the field of circulation of medicines (State Expert Center, State Service for Medicines and Drug Control) and the central executive body forms and ensures the implementation of state policy in general in the field of health care (Ministry of Health of Ukraine), forms and ensures: a) the procedure for examination and registration of re-registration of medicines; b) maintaining state registers of medicines; c) providing information from the registers to interested persons. Emphasis is placed on the need for an archival repository for information that is processed, stored and accumulated in the process of electronic reformatting.

Устная история как метод и источник «антропологии научной жизни»: работа с ведущими отечественными этнографами по истории полевых исследований на Алтае в 1950–2010-е годы (В. А. Липинская, Е. П. Батьянова)

The article raises the issues of studying anthropological contents of expedition (field) activity of ethnographers, considers the significance of personal origin documents, their presence and conditions in archival repositories of institutions of different levels. The conclusion is made about the insufficient source maintenance and the great significance of oral history as a method and source of scientific life anthropology. The focus of research attention is presented by conditions and factors of scientific works on Russians by V. A. Lipinskaja in the framework of expeditions of the Institution of ethnography of the Academy of Science of the USSR to Siberia in the years 1960-1990-ths, as well as anthropological aspects of field research work of E. P.Batjanova, who conducted «single-handed» research in the years 1980-2010-ths. The source base is constituted by interview materials, memoirs, diaries, letters.

A molecular map of lung neuroendocrine neoplasms.

BackgroundLung neuroendocrine neoplasms (LNENs) are rare solid cancers, with most genomic studies including a limited number of samples. Recently, generating the first multi-omic dataset for atypical pulmonary carcinoids and the first methylation dataset for large-cell neuroendocrine carcinomas led us to the discovery of clinically relevant molecular groups, as well as a new entity of pulmonary carcinoids (supra-carcinoids).ResultsTo promote the integration of LNENs molecular data, we provide here detailed information on data generation and quality control for whole-genome/exome sequencing, RNA sequencing, and EPIC 850K methylation arrays for a total of 84 patients with LNENs. We integrate the transcriptomic data with other previously published data and generate the first comprehensive molecular map of LNENs using the Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) dimension reduction technique. We show that this map captures the main biological findings of previous studies and can be used as reference to integrate datasets for which RNA sequencing is available. The generated map can be interactively explored and interrogated on the UCSC TumorMap portal (https://tumormap.ucsc.edu/?p=RCG_lungNENomics/LNEN). The data, source code, and compute environments used to generate and evaluate the map as well as the raw data are available, respectively, in a Nextjournal interactive notebook (https://nextjournal.com/rarecancersgenomics/a-molecular-map-of-lung-neuroendocrine-neoplasms/) and at the EMBL-EBI European Genome-phenome Archive and Gene Expression Omnibus data repositories.ConclusionsWe provide data and all resources needed to integrate them with future LNENs transcriptomic studies, allowing meaningful conclusions to be drawn that will eventually lead to a better understanding of this rare understudied disease.

Advocacy as a strategy to raise the archival profile through the civil society in South Africa

ABSTRACT In South Africa, public archives repositories are operating with limited resources and under strenuous circumstances due to low profiles in the public arena. Advocacy as a tool to raise the archival profile in South Africa for the purpose of lobbying support has not been adequately explored by archivists and civil society in the country. The purpose of this study is to examine the archival advocacy initiatives of civil society organizations in South Africa to determine where and how advocacy can be improved. Data were collected through document analysis, interviews and a literature review to examine archival advocacy approaches by archivists and civil society in South Africa. It was established that the role of civil society organizations in raising the archival profile in South Africa had not been adequate. Furthermore, archivists are conspicuous in their absence in the discourse involving archives. Advocacy has the power to influence constitutional, legislation, and policy reformation. The archival community in South Africa needs advocacy in different forms to challenge those in influential offices to serve their (archival community) interests. Unless archivists become advocates for archives, they risk reducing themselves to arid functionaries.

Development of Microbiome Biobanks – Challenges and Opportunities

The microbiome research field is rapidly evolving, but the required biobanking infrastructure is currently fragmented and not prepared for the biobanking of microbiomes. The rapid advancement of technologies requires an urgent assessment of how biobanks can underpin research by preserving microbiome samples and their functional potential.

Behavior of the Cultivable Airborne Mycobiota in Air-Conditioned Environments of Three Havanan Archives, Cuba

High concentrations of environmental fungi in the archives repositories are dangerous for the documents preserved in those places and for the workers' health. The aims of this work were to evaluate the behavior of the fungal concentration and diversity in the indoor air of repositories of 3 archives located in Havana, Cuba, and to demonstrate the potential risk that these taxa represent for the documentary heritage preserved in these institutions. The indoor and outdoor environments were sampled with a biocollector. From the I/O ratios, it was evident that two of the studied archives were not contaminated, while one of them did show contamination despite having temperature and relative humidity values very similar to the other two. Aspergillus, Penicillium and Cladosporium were the predominant genera in the indoor environments. New finds for archival environments were the genera Harposporium and Scolecobasidium. The principal species classified ecologically as abundant were C. cladosporioides and P. citrinum. They are known as opportunistic pathogenic fungi. All the analyzed taxa excreted acids, the most of them degraded cellulose, starch and gelatin while about 48% excreted different pigments. But 33% of them showed the highest biodeteriogenic potential, evidencing that they are the most dangerous for the documentary collections.

Insights on early mutational events in SARS-CoV-2 virus reveal founder effects across geographical regions

Here we aim to describe early mutational events across samples from publicly available SARS-CoV-2 sequences from the sequence read archive and GenBank repositories. Up until 27 March 2020, we downloaded 50 illumina datasets, mostly from China, USA (WA State) and Australia (VIC). A total of 30 datasets (60%) contain at least a single founder mutation and most of the variants are missense (over 63%). Five-point mutations with clonal (founder) effect were found in USA next-generation sequencing samples. Sequencing samples from North America in GenBank (22 April 2020) present this signature with up to 39% allele frequencies among samples (n = 1,359). Australian variant signatures were more diverse than USA samples, but still, clonal events were found in these samples. Mutations in the helicase, encoded by the ORF1ab gene in SARS-CoV-2 were predominant, among others, suggesting that these regions are actively evolving. Finally, we firmly urge that primer sets for diagnosis be carefully designed, since rapidly occurring variants would affect the performance of the reverse transcribed quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) based viral testing.

PERANCANGAN REPOSITORI ARSIP DIGITAL ISTANA SIAK

The digital archive which is the object of this research is the archive of Sultan Syarif Qasim II, who ruled in the period 1915-1946. The entire archive numbered approximately 60 thousand, and most of the archive has been restored and digitized. At present, all existing digital archives have not yet been processed and completely identified. Of these, there are 3000 new archives that are allowed to be accessed and processed by researchers. The purpose of this study is to classify the Siak Istana digital archive and create a database in the form of a Siak Istana digital archive repository. The method used in this study is the observatory method to obtain data in the form of digital archives. The research was carried out at the Siak Archive District Library and Archives Service. The results of his research, from a sample of 3000 digital archives, 149 archives were successfully processed by researchers. For repository applications, researchers use the SETIADI repository application.

Oral butyrate does not affect innate immunity and islet autoimmunity in individuals with longstanding type 1 diabetes: a randomised controlled trial.

The pathophysiology of type 1 diabetes has been linked to altered gut microbiota and more specifically to a shortage of intestinal production of the short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) butyrate, which may play key roles in maintaining intestinal epithelial integrity and in human and gut microbial metabolism. Butyrate supplementation can protect against autoimmune diabetes in mouse models. We thus set out to study the effect of oral butyrate vs placebo on glucose regulation and immune variables in human participants with longstanding type 1 diabetes. We administered a daily oral dose of 4g sodium butyrate or placebo for 1month to 30 individuals with longstanding type 1 diabetes, without comorbidity or medication use, in a randomised (1:1), controlled, double-blind crossover trial, with a washout period of 1month in between. Participants were randomly allocated to the 'oral sodium butyrate capsules first' or 'oral placebo capsules first' study arm in blocks of five. The clinical investigator received blinded medication from the clinical trial pharmacy. All participants, people doing measurements or examinations, or people assessing the outcomes were blinded to group assignment. The primary outcome was a change in the innate immune phenotype (monocyte subsets and in vitro cytokine production). Secondary outcomes were changes in blood markers of islet autoimmunity (cell counts, lymphocyte stimulation indices and CD8 quantum dot assays), glucose and lipid metabolism, beta cell function (by mixed-meal test), gut microbiota and faecal SCFA. The data was collected at the Amsterdam University Medical Centers. All 30 participants were analysed. Faecal butyrate and propionate levels were significantly affected by oral butyrate supplementation and butyrate treatment was safe. However, this modulation of intestinal SCFAs did not result in any significant changes in adaptive or innate immunity, or in any of the other outcome variables. In our discussion, we elaborate on this important discrepancy with previous animal work. Oral butyrate supplementation does not significantly affect innate or adaptive immunity in humans with longstanding type 1 diabetes. Netherlands Trial Register: NL4832 (www.trialregister.nl). Raw sequencing data are available in the European Nucleotide Archive repository (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browse) under study PRJEB30292. The study was funded by a Le Ducq consortium grant, a CVON grant, a personal ZONMW-VIDI grant and a Dutch Heart Foundation grant.

University archives both old and new: the case of New York University, and its campuses in New York and Abu Dhabi

The nature and role of university archives, as well as the archival profession in general, have evolved rapidly over the past several decades. Two archival repositories within New York University v...

A Comparative Analysis of Data Augmentation Approaches for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Scan Images of Brain Tumor.

Introduction:Machine Learning (ML) is a rapidly growing subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is used for different purposes in our daily life such as face recognition, speech recognition, text translation in different languages, weather prediction, and business prediction. In parallel, ML also plays an important role in the medical domain such as in medical imaging. ML has various algorithms that need to be trained with large volumes of data to produce a well-trained model for prediction.Aim:The aim of this study is to highlight the most suitable Data Augmentation (DA) technique(s) for medical imaging based on their results.Methods:DA refers to different approaches that are used to increase the size of datasets. In this study, eight DA approaches were used on publicly available low-grade glioma tumor datasets obtained from the Tumor Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) repository. The dataset included 1961 MRI brain scan images of low-grade glioma patients. You Only Look Once (YOLO) version 3 model was trained on the original dataset and the augmented datasets separately. A neural network training/testing ecosystem named as supervisely with Tesla K80 GPU was used for YOLO v3 model training on all datasets.Results:The results showed that the DA techniques rotate at 180o and rotate at 90o performed the best as data enhancement techniques for medical imaging.Conclusion:Rotation techniques are found significant to enhance the low volume of medical imaging datasets.

Из истории архивного дела в Башкирии. 1920-е гг.

The article examines problems of archival documents protection in the Bashkir ASSR in the first years of the Soviet power. History of the State Archival Service of Bashkiria goes back to August 11, 1919, when the Ufa Gubernia Division of the Glavarchive (Main Directorate for Archiving) was founded by resolution of the Collegium of the Glavarchive of the RSFSR. Alongside with the Ufa Gubernia Archive there was the Archive of the BASSR in Sterlitamak, capital of Small Bashkiria. It was established upon initiative of the Head of the Bashkir Revolutionary Committee A. Z. Validov on March 18, 1920. The article reviews the historiography of the issue. Its novelty is based on using unpublished sources from the fonds of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, National Archive of the Republic of Bashkortostan, and State Archive of the Orenburg Region (one of major and oldest regional archives), that are being thus introduced into scientific use. The article reviews main episodes, concerning documents protection: loss of archival materials in the days of the Civil War, first attempts of acquisition and archive fonds systematization. It focuces on issues of preservation of archival fonds of the Ufa Gubernia Government, Ufa District Court, Ufa Religious Consistory, Ufa Gendarmery Department, Orenburg Mohammedan Religious Assembly, Orenburg Education District, Ufa Directorate for Agriculture and Public Property, Ufa Gubernia Zemstvo, Ufa Land Use Commission. It also describes identification of the 1920s volost and country manorial archives of the Usergan, Burzyan-Tangaur, Tabyn, and Yurmaty cantons of Bashkiria. The article addresses the loss of archival documents due to events of the Civil War, absence of archival repositories, insufficient funding of archiving, and stealage. Nevertheless, the analysis of regional archive activities in the documents preservation sphere demonstrates that invaluable archival documentary heritage of Bashkiria has mostly survived, despite poor conditions of archival records storage.

Africanisation of the South African archival curriculum: A preliminary study of undergraduate courses in an open distance e-learning environment

Educators and archivists in Africa have repeatedly raised the need for redeveloping university curricula to reflect local and global best practice. An African education curriculum case study by the InterPARES project (2013–2018) that covered 38 countries out of 54 revealed the existence of few available archival training programmes in the continent. Literature further reveals that where educational programmes are available, the curriculum is mostly Eurocentric and thereby addresses archival issues from a Western perspective. As a result, the infinite problems facing archivists on the continent such as resources, skills, technology, infrastructure, advocacy, holdings, collaboration, displaced archives and many more (the list is endless) are not fully engaged. The archival programmes at the institution of higher learning appear not to address grand societal challenges such as unaccountability, poor governance, service delivery, as well as the low usage of archives repositories in the continent. In South Africa, there has been a call to use African epistemologies such as Ubuntu, a philosophy that provides an African overview of societal relations or the Batho Pele, principles adopted by the post-apartheid South African government to guide and direct its public service and address imbalances of the apartheid regime. This study utilised the Africanisation pillar of Sibanda (2016)’s model to analyse the infusion of curriculum transformation into the ten modules for archives and records management in an open distance e-learning (ODeL) environment. In this regard, the content of ten archives and records management modules for a bachelor’s degree in an ODeL environment is analysed to explore the transformation of archival curriculum. Only one university in South Africa offers a fully-fledged bachelor’s degree with a major in archives and records management. The study established that an attempt was made to transform the archival curriculum at study material development and module delivery level. This resulted in a missed opportunity to transform archival curriculum in the development of the new bachelor’s degree being implemented in 2017. The study concludes by arguing that failure to decolonise the archival curriculum will result in archivists being highly unlikely to contribute to solutions to societal problems that are difficult to solve confronting South Africa using local solutions. It is recommended that transformation of the curriculum should start at a programme level rather than module level.

Auditoria de repositórios arquivísticos digitais confiáveis

Este estudo discute a implementação de repositórios arquivísticos em conformidade com o Sistema Aberto para Arquivamento de Informação e a necessidade de auditá-los para avaliar sua confiabilidade. Para tanto, realiza-se um levantamento bibliográfico de materiais previamente publicados, com seleção de: livros que abordam as perspectivas da Arquivística na era digital e o desafio da custódia documental confiável; publicações técnicas como as normas International Organization for Standardization e padrões de auditoria; e artigos científicos recuperados pela ferramenta de pesquisa Google Scholar, com busca temática relacionada à preservação de documentos arquivísticos digitais, repositórios digitais confiáveis, auditoria de informação e auditoria arquivística. O repositório arquivístico é o prisma da discussão, já a comparação entre os padrões de auditoria torna-se a categoria norteadora, logo, obtém-se um artigo de revisão assistemática. Dessa forma, são analisados os padrões de auditoria: Trustworthy Repository Audit & Certification: Criteria and Checklist, Catalogue of Criteria for Trusted Digital Repositories da Network of Expertise in long-term STORage, Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment e Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories. Por fim, o comparativo entre os padrões demonstra que o Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories é o mais indicado para auditar os repositórios arquivísticos digitais.

'Let the little children come to archives': schools as a conduit for taking archives to children

Public programming initiatives are considered an integral part of archival operations across the world because they support a greater use of archival records. In South Africa, public archival institutions are mandated in terms of section 5(1)(c) of the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa Act (Act No. 43 of 1996) (NARSSA Act) to reach out to the less privileged sectors of society, including children, by making known information concerning records by means such as publications, exhibitions and lending of records. As a result, public archives repositories in South Africa have designed programmes to take archives to school learners for the purpose of creating future users and expanding the use of archival sources. Despite efforts to take archives to the people in South Africa, it would seem that public programming methods that repositories use at schools are not effective in creating awareness and promoting public archives to attract school learners. This qualitative study utilised semi-structured interviews and observation as data collection tools to investigate schools as conduits for taking public archives to learners in the Gauteng province of South Africa. The key findings suggest that the public archives repositories in Gauteng do not use technology, particularly social media, to market their services to school learners. The main method of taking archives to learners is through invitations and participation in the annual archives week, which do not yield any positive results, as learners do not visit the archives afterwards. It is recommended that public archives repositories in Gauteng should consider using school learners who participated in the previous archives week as ambassadors to further recommend the use of archives to potential users and their peers. Furthermore, collaboration between archivists and teachers from neighbouring schools should be considered by including school projects that involve the use of “archives’’. In this regard, the repositories should be able to provide access to such learners. The study concludes that failure to adopt social media platforms to market archives would result in school learners not using archives.

Computational nanoplasmonics in the quasistatic limit for biosensing applications.

The phenomenon of localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) provides high sensitivity in detecting biomolecules through shifts in resonance frequency when a target is present. Computational studies in this field have used the full Maxwell equations with simplified models of a sensor-analyte system, or they neglected the analyte altogether. In the long-wavelength limit, one can simplify the theory via an electrostatics approximation while adding geometrical detail in the sensor and analytes (at moderate computational cost). This work uses the latter approach, expanding the open-source PyGBe code to compute the extinction cross section of metallic nanoparticles in the presence of any target for sensing. The target molecule is represented by a surface mesh, based on its crystal structure. PyGBe is research software for continuum electrostatics, written in python with computationally expensive parts accelerated on GPU hardware, via PyCUDA. It is also accelerated algorithmically via a treecode that offers O(NlogN) computational complexity. These features allow PyGBe to handle problems with half a million boundary elements or more. In this work, we demonstrate the suitability of PyGBe, extended to compute LSPR response in the electrostatic limit, for biosensing applications. Using a model problem consisting of an isolated silver nanosphere in an electric field, our results show grid convergence as 1/N, and accurate computation of the extinction cross section as a function of wavelength (compared with an analytical solution). For a model of a sensor-analyte system, consisting of a spherical silver nanoparticle and a set of bovine serum albumin (BSA) proteins, our results again obtain grid convergence as 1/N (with respect to the Richardson extrapolated value). Computing the LSPR response as a function of wavelength in the presence of BSA proteins captures a redshift of 0.5 nm in the resonance frequency due to the presence of the analytes at 1-nm distance. The final result is a sensitivity study of the biosensor model, obtaining the shift in resonance frequency for various distances between the proteins and the nanoparticle. All results in this paper are fully reproducible, and we have deposited in archival data repositories all the materials needed to run the computations again and recreate the figures. PyGBe is open source under a permissive license and openly developed. Documentation is available at http://pygbe.github.io/pygbe/docs/.

RCR Report for Analysis of Spatiotemporal Properties of Stochastic Systems Using TSTL

“Analysis of Spatiotemporal Properties of Stochastic Systems Using TSTL” [1] proposes a three-valued spatiotemporal logic to enrich the analysis framework for Signal Spatiotemporal Logic previously developed by the authors. This allows one to reason on the evolution of the satisfaction of properties expressed in a spatiotemporal logic, providing additional insight on the behavior of the studied system. The approach has been validated on two case studies: the fire spread and evacuation models originally presented in [2], and a novel case study on privacy in a communication network. This replicated computation result report focuses on the artifact accompanying the article, consisting in a prototypical tool implementation of the techniques presented in the article, together with all files necessary to replicate the analysis performed thereof. The artifact is available at https://ludovicalv.github.io/TOMACS/. After a few iterations with the authors, I found that the artifact agrees with the guidelines on availability (Artifact Avaliable) and replicability (Results Replicated) dictated in https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/artifact-review-badging. The software was made available in an accessible archival repository, and thanks to the instructions provided in the accompanying webapge, it has been straightforward to replicate the experimental results from the article.

The Polish Underground Home Army (AK) and the Jews: What Postwar Jewish Testimonies and Wartime Documents Reveal

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. The attitude of the Polish Home Army (AK) to Nazi exterminationist policies is among the most controversial topics of wartime Polish–Jewish relations. Scholarly studies appearing since the 1980s have reconstructed the Home Army’s complex local and national organizations, its many sub-divisions and departments, its policies and objectives, as well as its sacrifice in the Warsaw Uprising of August–September 1944. In this article, I will analyze Holocaust survivor testimonies as a source for evaluating the attitude and behavior of the Home Army towards the Jews during the Second World War. Archival repositories used will include testimonies preserved at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, and the Shoah Foundation Visual Archive at the University of Southern California. I will demonstrate that the widely held view in collective Jewish memory and Jewish historiography that the Home Army was hostile is largely confirmed by these sources. At the same time, however, the same sources reveal that a substantial minority of the testimonies—approximately 30 percent—tells stories of a Home Army that rescued and protected Jews. The second part of this article compares testimonies to the documentary record, asking whether or not the behavior of the Home Army as a whole reflected the experience of Jews as reflected in postwar testimonies. The article will give more concrete form to the debate over the Polish underground’s attitude and behavior towards the Jews during the Second World War.

Two linked TBXT (brachyury) gene polymorphisms are associated with the tailless phenotype in fat-rumped sheep.

Summary T‐box transcription factor T (TBXT), encoding the brachyury protein, is an embryonic nuclear transcription factor involved in mesoderm formation and differentiation. Previous studies indicate that TBXT mutations are responsible for the tailless or short‐tailed phenotype of many vertebrates. To verify whether the tailless phenotype in fat‐rumped sheep is associated with TBXT mutations, exon 2 of the TBXT gene for 301 individuals belonging to 13 Chinese and Iranian sheep breeds was directly sequenced. Meanwhile, 380 samples were used to detect the genotypes of the candidate variations by mapping to their reads databases in the Sequence Read Archive repository of GenBank. The results showed that one missense mutation, c.334G>T (GGG>TGG) with a completely linked synonymous variant c.333G>C (CCG>CCC) was found to be associated with the ‘tailless’ characteristic in typical fat‐rumped sheep breeds. The c.334G>T transversion led to the conversion of glycine to tryptophan at the 112th amino acid in the T‐box domain of the brachyury protein. In addition, crossbreeding experiments for long‐tailed and tailless sheep showed that CT/CT allele of nucleotides (nt) 333 and 334, a recessive mutation, would cause sheep tails to be shorter, suggesting that these two linked variants at nucleotides 333 and 334 in TBXT are probably causative mutations responsible for the tailless phenotype in sheep.