Publications by authors named "Angela D Hornsby"
Trends Ecol Evol
May 2024
Article Synopsis
- Rodent middens are piles of animal poop that can show us what plants and animals lived in an area a long time ago.
- In the Americas, scientists study these middens to understand how species changed with the environment and other historical factors.
- To get the most out of these studies and help with conservation efforts, researchers need to work together and explore more midden records from around the world.
Article Synopsis
- - Natural history museums hold important specimens, samples, and data that help us understand the natural world.
- - A recent commentary discusses the need for more compassionate collection methods for specimens in these museums.
- - It raises the question of whether it's feasible to entirely stop the collection of whole animal specimens in the future.
Mol Biol Evol
September 2021
Article Synopsis
- The study focuses on understanding how Taricha newts developed resistance to their own deadly toxin, tetrodotoxin (TTX), which involves complex adaptations in their Nav gene family.
- Researchers sequenced the entire Nav gene family to trace the origins of TTX self-resistance, revealing that moderate resistance evolved early in salamanders, well before the emergence of TTX-rich newts.
- Findings show that unique genetic changes, positive selection, and gene conversion events within the Nav gene family contributed to the newts’ enhanced TTX resistance, demonstrating how gene conversion can speed up the evolution of related genes under similar pressures.
