Clinical Reasoning: A 68-Year-Old Man With Progressive Numbness, Vertigo, and Cognitive Decline.

A 68-year-old man presented with subacute progressive numbness in his lower extremities and vertigo. Concurrently, he developed behavioral and cognitive changes. Initial examination demonstrated mild distal symmetric weakness in the lower extremities, allodynia in the feet, decreased proprioception at the ankles, and absent reflexes in the lower extremities.

Bat genomes illuminate adaptations to viral tolerance and disease resistance.

Zoonoses are infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans. Bats have been suggested to harbour more zoonotic viruses than any other mammalian order. Infections in bats are largely asymptomatic, indicating limited tissue-damaging inflammation and immunopathology.

Frugivore Traits Predict Plant-Frugivore Interactions Using Generalized Joint Attribute Modeling.

Under an adaptive hypothesis, the reciprocal influence between mutualistic plants and frugivores is expected to result in suites of matching frugivore and plant traits that structure fruit consumption. Recent work has suggested fruit traits can represent adaptations to broad groups of functionally similar frugivores, but the role of frugivore traits and within-species variation in structuring fruit consumption is less understood. To address these knowledge gaps, we assess the presence of reciprocal trait matching for the mutualistic ecological network comprising of bats that feed on and disperse seeds.

Gene expression comparisons between captive and wild shrew brains reveal captivity effects.

Compared with their free-ranging counterparts, wild animals in captivity experience different conditions with lasting physiological and behavioural effects. Although shifts in gene expression are expected to occur upstream of these phenotypes, we found no previous gene expression comparisons of captive versus free-ranging mammals. We assessed gene expression profiles of three brain regions (cortex, olfactory bulb and hippocampus) of wild shrews () compared with shrews kept in captivity for two months and undertook sample dropout to examine robustness given limited sample sizes.