Language Barriers in Organismal Biology: What Can Journals Do Better?

In the field of organismal biology, as in much of academia, there is a strong incentive to publish in internationally recognized, highly regarded, English-language journals to promote career advancement. This expectation has created a linguistic hegemony in scientific publishing, whereby scholars for whom English is an additional language face additional barriers to achieving the same scientific recognition as scholars who speak English as a first language. Here, we surveyed the author guidelines of 230 journals in organismal biology with impact factors of 1.

Speciation and the developmental alarm clock.

New species arise as the genomes of populations diverge. The developmental 'alarm clock' of speciation sounds off when sufficient divergence in genetic control of development leads hybrid individuals to infertility or inviability, the world awoken to the dawn of new species with intrinsic post-zygotic reproductive isolation. Some developmental stages will be more prone to hybrid dysfunction due to how molecular evolution interacts with the ontogenetic timing of gene expression.

Genetic basis to hybrid inviability is more complex than hybrid male sterility in Caenorhabditis nematodes.

Hybrid male sterility often evolves before female sterility or inviability of hybrids, implying that the accumulation of divergence between separated lineages should lead hybrid male sterility to have a more polygenic basis. However, experimental evidence is mixed. Here, we use the nematodes Caenorhabditis remanei and C.

Gametic selection, developmental trajectories, and extrinsic heterogeneity in Haldane's rule.

Deciphering the genetic and developmental causes of the disproportionate rarity, inviability, and sterility of hybrid males, Haldane's rule, is important for understanding the evolution of reproductive isolation between species. Moreover, extrinsic and prezygotic factors can contribute to the magnitude of intrinsic isolation experienced between species with partial reproductive compatibility. Here, we use the nematodes Caenorhabditis briggsae and C.

Ribosomal DNA sequence polymorphism and the delineation of two ascosporic yeast species: Metschnikowia agaves and Starmerella bombicola.

The relationship between mating success and sequence divergence in the internal transcribed spacer (ITS)/5.8S-D1/D2 rDNA region was examined in isolates tentatively assigned to Metschnikowia agaves and Starmerella bombicola. Both species are haplontic and heterothallic, such that the formation of mature asci can be used as a measure of genetic compatibility.