Publications by authors named "Patrick J McLaughlin"

Article Synopsis
  • - The study examines the genetic and ecological differences among three species of giant tree frogs in West and Central Africa, revealing that for closely related species to coexist without interbreeding, they must develop distinct traits for ecological and reproductive isolation.
  • - Analyses of genetic data and environmental models indicate that these species' divergence aligns with historical forest fragmentation during the late Pliocene, leading to unique environmental niches for each species.
  • - Significant physical and behavioral differences were found, particularly in traits like tympanum size and mating calls, with two species coexisting in Central Africa without hybridization, suggesting that both ecology and reproductive characteristics play crucial roles in maintaining biodiversity in the region.
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Organismal traits interact with environmental variation to mediate how species respond to shared landscapes. Thus, differences in traits related to dispersal ability or physiological tolerance may result in phylogeographic discordance among co-distributed taxa, even when they are responding to common barriers. We quantified climatic suitability and stability, and phylogeographic divergence within three reed frog species complexes across the Guineo-Congolian forests and Gulf of Guinea archipelago of Central Africa to investigate how they responded to a shared climatic and geological history.

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Specialization onto different host plants has been hypothesized to be a major driver of diversification in insects, and traits controlling olfaction have been shown to play a fundamental role in host preferences. A diverse set of olfactory genes control olfactory traits in insects, and it remains unclear whether specialization onto different hosts is likely to involve a nonrandom subset of these genes. Here, we test the role of olfactory genes in a novel case of specialization in .

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African clawed frogs, genus Xenopus, are extraordinary among vertebrates in the diversity of their polyploid species and the high number of independent polyploidization events that occurred during their diversification. Here we update current understanding of the evolutionary history of this group and describe six new species from west and central sub-Saharan Africa, including four tetraploids and two dodecaploids. We provide information on molecular variation, morphology, karyotypes, vocalizations, and estimated geographic ranges, which support the distinctiveness of these new species.

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Primary adrenal angiosarcomas (PAA) are rare with 36 cases reported in the English literature. MYC protein expression and gene amplification have been detected in secondary angiosarcoma (AS), and a subset of primary AS. The aim of this study was to report the clinicopathologic features of PAA and examine these tumors for MYC amplification and protein expression in a small series of four cases (resection, n = 4).

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