Local sperm competition (LSC), which occurs when related sperm compete for access to a given set of eggs, can influence sex allocation (SA) in simultaneous hermaphrodites. Different factors that have been predicted to affect LSC-and hence, optimal SA-include the mating strategy (such as reciprocal mating vs. hypodermic insemination) and the ability to self-fertilize. Moreover, the level of LSC experienced could vary temporally and/or spatially, favouring the evolution of SA plasticity. However, it...
Sun Jun 14, 2020 03:00
The first complete chloroplast and Internal Transcribed Sequence (ITS) cassette sequences for the species: Saccharum giganteum, Saccharum longisetosum, Cleistachne sorghoides, Saccharum narenga and Tripsacum dactyloides are presented. Corresponding sequences for a new isolate of Sarga timorense were assembled. Phylogenetic analyses place S. giganteum, S. longisetosum and S. narenga within the Saccharinae but distinct from Saccharum, whilst C. sorghoides emerges as a member of genus Sarga and Tripsacum...
Sun Jun 14, 2020 03:00
The carpel is the definitive structure of angiosperms, the origin of carpel is of great significance to the phylogenetic origin of angiosperms. Traditional view was that angiosperm carpels were derived from structures similar to macrosporophylls of pteridosperms or Bennettitales, which bear ovules on the surfaces of foliar organs. In contrast, other views indicate that carpels are originated from the foliar appendage enclosing the ovule-bearing axis. One of the key differences between these two conflicting...
Sat Jun 13, 2020 03:00
The ribosome's common core, comprised of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) and universal ribosomal proteins, connects all life back to a common ancestor and serves as a window to relationships among organisms. The rRNA of the common core is most similar to rRNA of extant bacteria. In eukaryotes, the rRNA of the common core is decorated by expansion segments (ES's) that vastly increase its size. Supersized ES's have not been observed previously in Archaea, and the origin of eukaryotic ES's remains enigmatic. We...
Sat Jun 13, 2020 03:00
SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19 pandemic, is an RNA virus prone to mutations. Interaction of SARS-CoV-2 Spike (S) protein with the host cell receptor, Angiotensin-I Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE2) is pivotal for attachment and entry of the virus. Yet, natural mutations acquired on S protein during the pandemic and their impact on viral infectivity, transmission dynamics and disease pathogenesis remains poorly understood. Here, we analysed 2952 SARS-CoV-2 genomes across the globe, and identified...
Sat Jun 13, 2020 03:00
Ecological specialization is widely thought to influence patterns of species richness by affecting rates at which species multiply and perish. Quantifying specialization is challenging, and using only one or a small number of ecological axes could bias estimates of overall specialization. Here, we calculate an index of specialization, based on seven measured traits, and estimate its effect on speciation and extinction rates in a large clade of birds. We find that speciation rate is independent of...
Sat Jun 13, 2020 03:00
Seasonal influenza virus A/H3N2 is a major cause of death globally. Vaccination remains the most effective preventative. Rapid mutation of hemagglutinin allows viruses to escape adaptive immunity. This antigenic drift necessitates regular vaccine updates. Effective vaccine strains need to represent H3N2 populations circulating one year after strain selection. Experts select strains based on experimental measurements of antigenic drift and predictions made by models from hemagglutinin sequences. We...
Sat Jun 13, 2020 03:00
The fitness effects of random mutations are contingent upon the genetic and environmental contexts in which they occur, and this contributes to the unpredictability of evolutionary outcomes at the molecular level. Despite this unpredictability, the rate of adaptation in homogeneous environments tends to decrease over evolutionary time, due to diminishing returns epistasis, causing relative fitness gains to be predictable over the long term. Here, we studied the extent of diminishing returns epistasis...
Sat Jun 13, 2020 03:00
Host antiviral proteins engage in evolutionary arms races with viruses, in which both sides rapidly evolve at interaction interfaces to gain or evade immune defense. For example, primate TRIM5 uses its rapidly evolving v1 loop to bind retroviral capsids, and single mutations in this loop can dramatically improve retroviral restriction. However, it is unknown whether such gains of viral restriction are rare, or if they incur loss of pre-existing function against other viruses. Using deep mutational...
Sat Jun 13, 2020 03:00
Speciation in the absence of divergent selection remains a topic of active debate in evolutionary biology. Existing empirical and theoretical studies have linked the process of speciation to complex genetic interactions. Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) capture the inter-dependencies of gene expression and encode information for individual development on a molecular level, which form a feedback loop to learn both patterns and effects of hybrid incompatibilities. Here, we develop a pathway framework...
Sat Jun 13, 2020 03:00
Synthetic engineering of bacteria to produce industrial products is a burgeoning field of research and application. In order to optimize genome design, designers need to understand which genes are essential, which are optimal for growth, and locations in the genome that will be tolerated by the organism when inserting engineered cassettes. We present a pan-genome based method for the identification of core regions in a genome that are strongly conserved at the species level. We show that these core...
Fri Jun 12, 2020 03:00
Climate change affects organisms worldwide with profound ecological and evolutionary consequences, often increasing population extinction risk. Climatic factors can also increase the strength, variability or direction of natural selection on phenotypic traits, potentially driving adaptive evolution. Phenotypic plasticity in relation to temperature can allow organisms to maintain fitness in response to increasing temperatures, thereby buying time for subsequent genetic adaptation and promoting evolutionary...
Fri Jun 12, 2020 03:00
Paleogenetics is a relatively new and promising field that has the potential to provide new information about past Indigenous social systems, including insights into the complexity of burial practices. We present results of the first ancient DNA (aDNA) investigation into traditional mortuary practices among Australian Aboriginal people with a focus on North-East Australia. We recovered mitochondrial and Y chromosome sequences from five ancestral Aboriginal Australian remains that were excavated from...
Fri Jun 12, 2020 03:00
Parasites are a major evolutionary force, driving adaptive responses in host populations. Although the link between phenotypic response to parasite-mediated natural selection and the underlying genetic architecture often remains obscure, this link is crucial for understanding the evolution of resistance and predicting associated allele frequency changes in the population. To close this gap, we monitored the response to selection during epidemics of a virulent bacterial pathogen, Pasteuria ramosa,...
Fri Jun 12, 2020 03:00
Next-generation-sequencing haplotype callers are commonly used in studies to call variants from newly-sequenced species. However, due to the current availability of genomic resources, it is still common practice to use only one reference genome for a given genus, or even one reference for an entire clade of a higher taxon. The problem with traditional haplotype callers such as the one from GATK, is that they are optimized for variant calling at the population level, but not at the phylogenetic level....
Fri Jun 12, 2020 03:00
High altitude temperate mountains have long been considered devoid of life owing to high extinction or low speciation rates during the Pleistocene. We performed a phylogenetic and population genomic investigation of an emblematic high-altitude plant clade (Androsace sect. Aretia, 31 currently recognized species), based on plant surveys conducted during alpinism expeditions. Surprisingly, we inferred that this clade originated in the Miocene and continued diversifying through Pleistocene glaciations,...
Fri Jun 12, 2020 03:00
The formation of extracellular DNA traps (ETosis) is a mechanism of first response by specific immune cells following pathogen encounters. Historically a defining behavior of vertebrate neutrophils, cells capable of ETosis were recently discovered in several invertebrate taxa. Using pathogen and drug stimuli, we report that ctenophores - thought to represent the earliest-diverging animal lineage - possess cell types capable of ETosis, suggesting that this cellular immune response behavior likely...
Sun Jun 14, 2020 03:00
Population divergence and gene flow are key processes in evolution and ecology. Model-based analysis of genome-wide datasets allows discrimination between alternative scenarios for these processes even in non-model taxa. We used two complementary approaches (one based on the blockwise site frequency spectrum (bSFS), the second on the Pairwise Sequentially Markovian Coalescent (PSMC)) to infer the divergence history of a fig wasp, Pleistodontes nigriventris. Pleistodontes nigriventris and its fig...
Sun Jun 14, 2020 03:00
Dietary Restriction (DR) via protein restriction (PR) has become an inquisitive field and has established feasible trade-offs between various fitness and behavioral traits in Drosophila melanogaster to understand lifespan or aging in a nutritionally challenged environment. However, the phenotypes of body size, weight and wing length respond according to factors such as flies genotype, environmental exposure, and parental diet. Hence, understanding the long-term effect of PR on these phenotypes is...
Sun Jun 14, 2020 03:00
Streptococcus pneumoniae can be split into multiple strains, each with a characteristic combination of core and accessory genome variation, able to co-circulate and compete within the same hosts. Previous analyses of epidemiological datasets suggested the short-term vaccine-associated dynamics of S. pneumoniae strains may be mediated through multi-locus negative frequency-dependent selection (NFDS), acting to maintain accessory loci at equilibrium frequencies. To test whether this model could explain...
Fri Jun 12, 2020 03:00
There is no satisfactory explanation for why peacock possesses a tail, presence and especially courtship display of which makes the organism vulnerable to predation. Here, I present a model according to which in a polygynous mating system a mechanism which increases vulnerability to predation, a Zahavian handicap, evolves when other two mechanisms to identify high-quality males are either absent or are not sufficiently strong. The two mechanisms are: 1) male resource acquisition ability, and 2) male-male...
Fri Jun 12, 2020 03:00
Ongoing antagonistic coevolution with selfish genetic elements (SGEs) can drive the evolution of host genomes. Here, we investigated whether natural variation allows some Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains to suppress their endogenous SGEs, 2-micron plasmids. 2-micron plasmids are multicopy nuclear parasites that have co-evolved with budding yeasts. To quantitatively measure plasmid stability, we developed a new Single-Cell Assay for Measuring Plasmid Retention (SCAMPR) that measures copy number heterogeneity...
Fri Jun 12, 2020 03:00
Heritable symbionts can modify a range of ecologically important host traits, including behavior. About half of all insect species are infected with maternally transmitted Wolbachia, a bacterial endosymbiont known to alter host reproduction, nutrient acquisition, and virus susceptibility. Here, we broadly test the hypothesis that Wolbachia modify host behavior by assessing the effects of eight different Wolbachia strains on the temperature preference of six Drosophila melanogaster-subgroup species....
Fri Jun 12, 2020 03:00
Publication date: Available online 13 June 2020Source: Brain Research BulletinAuthor(s): Yi Liu, Di Wen, Jingqi Gao, Bing Xie, Hailei Yu, Qianchao Shen, Jingjing Zhang, Weiwei Jing, Bin Cong, Chunling Ma
00:51
Inhibition of NK1R attenuates LPS-induced microglial inflammation and consequent death of PC12 cells
Publication date: Available online 12 June 2020Source: Brain Research BulletinAuthor(s): Weifeng Jiang, Xiaoying Wang, Wei Wang, Fang Hua, Zunsheng Zhang, Zuohui Zhang, Jie Xiang, Xinxin Yang
Sat Jun 13, 2020 13:54
Publication date: Available online 12 June 2020Source: Brain Research BulletinAuthor(s): A. Broncel, R. Bocian, P. Kłos-Wojtczak, J Konopacki
Sat Jun 13, 2020 13:54
Publication date: Available online 12 June 2020Source: Brain Research BulletinAuthor(s): Shuangxi Chen, Qiong Jiang, Peizhi Huang, Chengliang Hu, Huifan Shen, Melitta Schachner, Weijiang Zhao
Sat Jun 13, 2020 13:54
Publication date: Available online 12 June 2020Source: Brain Research BulletinAuthor(s): Qin Wu, Ziyang Xu, Siyuan Song, Hong Zhang, Wenying Zhang, Liping Liu, Yuping Chen, Jihu Sun
Fri Jun 12, 2020 17:44
Publication date: Available online 11 June 2020Source: Brain Research BulletinAuthor(s): Qiang Xu, Zheng Hu, Fang Yang, Boris C. Bernhardt, Qirui Zhang, Steven M Stufflebeam, Zhiqiang Zhang, Guangming Lu
Fri Jun 12, 2020 17:44
Audigy has released new advanced telehealth solutions for affiliated audiology practices to provide remote care for their patients. The release is especially timely, given health and safety concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic. These telehealth features come as a standard with Audigy's proprietary "e-patient," a web-based product that visualizes and simplifies the hearing care process for patients and standardizes operations for the practice. "I'm incredibly thrilled to be able to offer this...
Wed Jun 10, 2020 19:13
Publication date: Available online 13 June 2020Source: Behavioural Brain ResearchAuthor(s): David Darevsky, Frederic W. Hopf
00:06
Publication date: Available online 13 June 2020Source: Behavioural Brain ResearchAuthor(s): Matteo Tonna, Davide Ponzi, Paola Palanza, Carlo Marchesi, Stefano Parmigiani
00:06
Publication date: Available online 12 June 2020Source: Behavioural Brain ResearchAuthor(s): Karim Johari, Roozbeh Behroozmand
Sat Jun 13, 2020 15:08
Publication date: Available online 11 June 2020Source: Behavioural Brain ResearchAuthor(s): Wakana Sakuma, Osamu Nakagawasai, Wataru Nemoto, Takayo Odaira, Takumi Ogawa, Kiminori Ohta, Yasuyuki Endo, Koichi Tan-No
Fri Jun 12, 2020 19:09
Publication date: Available online 11 June 2020Source: Behavioural Brain ResearchAuthor(s): Monireh Mansouri, Hamidreza Pouretemad, Mehrdad Roghani, Gregers Wegener, Maryam Ardalan
Fri Jun 12, 2020 19:09
Publication date: Available online 11 June 2020Source: Behavioural Brain ResearchAuthor(s): Chunmao Yang, Jing Tang, Xin Liang, Yingqiang Qi, Yanmin Luo, Yuhan Xie, Jin Wang, Lin Jiang, Chunni Zhou, Chunxia Huang, Yong Tang
Fri Jun 12, 2020 19:09
Publication date: Available online 11 June 2020Source: Behavioural Brain ResearchAuthor(s): Marvin R. Diaz, Julia M. Johnson, Elena I. Varlinskaya
Fri Jun 12, 2020 19:09
Publication date: Available online 11 June 2020Source: Behavioural Brain ResearchAuthor(s): Marta Hereta, Kinga Kamińska, Magdalena Białoń, Agnieszka Wąsik, Elżbieta Lorenc-Koci, Zofia Rogóż
Fri Jun 12, 2020 19:09
Publication date: Available online 11 June 2020Source: Behavioural Brain ResearchAuthor(s): Roberto A. Prado-Alcalá, Sofía González-Salinas, Anaid Antaramián, Gina L. Quirarte, Paola C. Bello-Medina, Andrea C. Medina
Fri Jun 12, 2020 19:09
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