Sailing through the Late Pleistocene: unusual historical demography of an East Asian endemic, the Chinese Hwamei (Leucodioptron canorum canorum), during the last glacial period.

Pleistocene climate fluctuations shaped the patterns of genetic diversity observed in extant species. In contrast to Europe and North America where the effects of recent glacial cycles on genetic diversity have been well studied, the genetic legacy of the Late Pleistocene for East Asia, a region of great topographical complexity and presumably milder historical climate, remains poorly understood. We analysed 3.

The mitochondrial genome of Cygnus columbianus, the Whistling Swan.

The nucleotide sequence of the mitochondrial genome of the Whistling Swan, Cygnus columbianus, is reported. Many of the features common to avian mitochondrial genomes are present in C. columbianus and are described here.

Wolbachia infections in the Cimicidae: museum specimens as an untapped resource for endosymbiont surveys.

Wolbachia spp. are obligate maternally inherited endosymbiotic bacteria that infect diverse arthropods and filarial nematodes. Previous microscopic and molecular studies have identified Wolbachia in several bed bug species (Cimicidae), but little is known about how widespread Wolbachia infections are among the Cimicidae.

Solving a sequencing problem in the vertebrate mitochondrial control region using phylogenetic comparisons.

The mitochondrial control region (mtCR) of the bird-of-paradise, Phonygammus keraudrenii, the Trumpet Manucode, contains a unique arrangement of homopolymers and short tandem repeats. Homopolymers occur within a few hundred bases of each other, trapping sequence information between unsequenceable barriers. A comparative strategy, involving other manucode species, allowed the prediction of primer sites in the inaccessible region.

Phylogeny and diversification of the largest avian radiation.

The order Passeriformes ("perching birds") comprises extant species diversity comparable to that of living mammals. For over a decade, a single phylogenetic hypothesis based on DNA-DNA hybridization has provided the primary framework for numerous comparative analyses of passerine ecological and behavioral evolution and for tests of the causal factors accounting for rapid radiations within the group. We report here a strongly supported phylogenetic tree based on two single-copy nuclear gene sequences for the most complete sampling of passerine families to date.