Publications by authors named "D K Yeates"
Article Synopsis
- * A new study using phylogenomic analysis has clarified the phylogeny of mosquitoes, revealing their origins date back to the early Triassic period, which is significantly older than earlier estimates.
- * The research indicates that mosquitoes have repeatedly shifted to feeding on mammals throughout their evolution, with these changes often aligning with major continental drift and vertebrate diversification events.
Article Synopsis
- The Ephydroidea superfamily, which includes diverse families like Drosophilidae (vinegar flies) and Ephydridae (shore flies), presents challenges for understanding their evolutionary relationships due to their extreme diversity in life histories and morphology.
- Researchers used phylogenomic techniques, analyzing 320 nuclear genes from 32 Ephydroidea species, to investigate these relationships, leading to the conclusion that the superfamily is monophyletic with distinct evolutionary branches.
- Findings confirmed Mormotomyiidae as a unique family closely related to other Ephydroidea, with Cryptochetidae positioned as a sister lineage to a clade containing Drosophilidae and Braulidae, highlighting the importance of comprehensive species and character
The ability to resolve an approach-avoidance conflict is critical to adaptive behavior. The ventral CA3 (vCA3) and CA1 (vCA1) subfields of the ventral hippocampus (vHPC) have been shown to facilitate avoidance and approach behavior, respectively, in the face of motivational conflict, but the neural circuits by which this subfield-specific regulation is implemented is unknown. We demonstrate that two distinct pathways from these subfields to lateral septum (LS) contribute to this divergent control.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and nucleus accumbens (NAc) have been associated with the expression of adaptive and maladaptive behavior elicited by fear-related and drug-associated cues. However, reported effects of mPFC manipulations on cue-elicited natural reward-seeking and inhibition thereof have been varied, with few studies examining cortico-striatal contributions in tasks that require adaptive responding to cues signaling reward and punishment within the same session. The current study aimed to better elucidate the role of mPFC and NAc subdivisions, and their functional connectivity in cue-elicited adaptive responding using a novel discriminative cue responding task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe sequential breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea since the Middle Jurassic is one of the crucial factors that has driven the biogeographical patterns of terrestrial biotas. Despite decades of effort searching for concordant patterns between diversification and continental fragmentation among taxonomic groups, increasing evidence has revealed more complex and idiosyncratic scenarios resulting from a mixture of vicariance, dispersal and extinction. Aquatic insects with discreet ecological requirements, low vagility and disjunct distributions represent a valuable model for testing biogeographical hypotheses by reconstructing their distribution patterns and temporal divergences.
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