Monitoring genetic diversity of Torminalis glaberrima for resilient forests in the face of population fragmentation.

Background And Aims: Torminalis glaberrima (Gand.) Sennikov & Kurtto is a European tree species currently underutilized in forestry, valued for its high-quality wood and contribution to ecosystem stability. Despite a projected range expansion as climate change progresses, current population fragmentation levels may inhibit the species' ability to migrate and stabilize fragile forest ecosystems.

Tracking individual seed fate confirms mainly antagonistic interactions between rodents and European beech.

Food-hoarding granivores act as both predators and dispersers of plant seeds, resulting in facultative species interactions along a mutualism-antagonism continuum. The position along this continuum is determined by the positive and negative interactions that vary with the ratio between seed availability and animal abundance, particularly for mast-seeding species with interannual variation and spatial synchrony of seed production. Empirical data on the entire fate of seeds up to germination and the influence of rodents on seed survival is rare, resulting in a lack of consensus on their position along the mutualism-antagonism continuum.

Multiple, Single Trait GWAS and Supervised Machine Learning Reveal the Genetic Architecture of Fraxinus excelsior Tolerance to Ash Dieback in Europe.

Common ash (Fraxinus excelsior) is under intensive attack from the invasive alien pathogenic fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, causing ash dieback at epidemic levels throughout Europe. Previous studies have found significant genetic variation among genotypes in ash dieback susceptibility and that host phenology, such as autumn yellowing, is correlated with susceptibility of ash trees to H. fraxineus; however, the genomic basis of ash dieback tolerance in F.

Scots pine - panmixia and the elusive signal of genetic adaptation.

Scots pine is the foundation species of diverse forested ecosystems across Eurasia and displays remarkable ecological breadth, occurring in environments ranging from temperate rainforests to arid tundra margins. Such expansive distributions can be favored by various demographic and adaptive processes and the interactions between them. To understand the impact of neutral and selective forces on genetic structure in Scots pine, we conducted range-wide population genetic analyses on 2321 trees from 202 populations using genotyping-by-sequencing, reconstructed the recent demography of the species and examined signals of genetic adaptation.

(Un)Reliable detection of menstrual blood in forensic casework - evaluation of the Seratec® PMB test with mock samples.

The identification of the type of body fluid in crime scene evidence may be crucial, so that the efforts are high to reduce the complexity of these analyses and to minimize time and costs. Reliable immunochromatographic rapid tests for specific and sensitive identification of blood, saliva, urine and sperm secretions are already routinely used in forensic genetics. The recently introduced Seratec® PMB test is said to detect not only hemoglobin, but also differentiate menstrual blood from other secretions containing blood (cells) by detecting D-dimers.