Publications by authors named "E Trucchi"
Gene expression can accelerate ecological divergence by rapidly tweaking the response of an organism to novel environments, with more divergent environments exerting stronger selection and supposedly, requiring faster adaptive responses. Organisms adapted to extreme environments provide ideal systems to test this hypothesis, particularly when compared to related species with milder ecological niches. The Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) is the only endothermic vertebrate breeding in the harsh Antarctic winter, in stark contrast with the less cold-adapted sister species, the King penguin (A.
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- Islands serve as important evolutionary sites for creating new species but are vulnerable to environmental threats.
- The Ponza grayling, an endangered butterfly unique to two small islands in Italy, faces challenges due to its limited habitat and declining population.
- Researchers created a detailed reference genome for the Ponza grayling, paving the way for studying its genetic diversity and evolution, despite the difficulties in gathering certain genomic data.
Willd., a species distributed in Eastern Europe, has been the subject of various research endeavors aimed at assessing its suitability for extracting vegetable rennet for use in the production of local cheeses as a substitute for animal-derived rennet. In Italy, the species has an extremely fragmented and localized distribution in six locations scattered across the central-northern Apennines and some areas of southern Italy.
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- Nonadaptive hypotheses suggest that eukaryotic genome size increases when purifying selection weakens, predicting a relaxed selection signature in species with large genomes like lungfish.
- The study found that the Australian lungfish's transcriptome shows excessive transcription, likely due to poor transcriptional control.
- It also revealed a notable relaxation in coding genes of lungfish compared to other vertebrates, supporting the idea that large animal genomes evolved in a nearly neutral environment with less constraint on expansion.
In the mountain terrain, ice holes are little depressions between rock boulders that are characterized by the exit of cold air able to cool down the rock surface even in summer. This cold air creates cold microrefugia in warmer surroundings that preserve plant species probably over thousands of years under extra-zonal climatic conditions. We hypothesized that ice hole populations of the model species Vaccinium vitis-idaea (Ericaceae) show genetic differentiation from nearby zonal subalpine populations, and high functional trait distinctiveness, in agreement with genetic patterns.
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