Evolved and Plastic Gene Expression in Adaptation of a Specialist Fly to a Novel Niche.

How gene expression evolves to enable divergent ecological adaptation and how changes in gene expression relate to genomic architecture are pressing questions for understanding the mechanisms enabling adaptation and ecological speciation. Furthermore, how plasticity in gene expression can both contribute to and be affected by the process of ecological adaptation is crucial to understanding gene expression evolution, colonisation of novel niches and response to rapid environmental change. Here, we investigate the role of constitutive and plastic gene expression differences between host races, or host-specific ecotypes, of the peacock fly Tephritis conura, a thistle bud specialist.

Demonstration of Capture, Cooling, Tagging, and Spectroscopic Characterization of UV Photoproduct Ions in a Cryogenic Ion Trap: Application to 266 nm Photofragment Ions from Rhodamine 6G.

We demonstrate a method to determine the structures of the primary photodissociation products from a cryogenically cooled parent ion. In this approach, a target ion is cooled by a pulse of buffer gas and tagged in a 20 K Paul trap. The cold ion is then photodissociated by pulsed (∼5 ns) UV laser excitation, and the ionic products are trapped, cooled, and tagged by introduction of a second buffer gas pulse in the same trap.

Spectroscopic Evidence for Doubly Hydrogen-Bonded Cationic Dimers in the Solid, Liquid, and Gaseous Phases of Carboxyl-Functionalized Ionic Liquids.

Intermolecular interactions determine whether matter sticks together, gases condense into liquids, or liquids freeze into solids. The most prominent example is hydrogen bonding in water, responsible for the anomalous properties in the liquid phase and polymorphism in ice. The physical properties are also exceptional for ionic liquids (ILs), wherein a delicate balance of Coulomb interactions, hydrogen bonds, and dispersion interactions results in a broad liquid range and the vaporization of ILs as ion pairs.

Hydrogen Tag Shifts as Vibrational Reporters for Positional Isomers of Formylphenides: Surprising Mobility of the Carbanion Center upon Collisional Decarboxylation of the Parent Benzoates.

Infrared photodissociation of weakly bound "mass tags" is widely used to determine the structures of ions by analyzing their vibrational spectra. Molecular hydrogen is a common choice for tagging in cryogenic radio-frequency ion traps. Although the H molecules can introduce distortions in the target species, we demonstrate an advantage of H tagging in the analysis of positional isomers adopted by the molecular anions derived from decarboxylation of formylbenzoates.