FishResp: R package and GUI application for analysis of aquatic respirometry data.

Intermittent-flow respirometry is widely used to measure oxygen uptake rates and subsequently estimate aerobic metabolic rates of aquatic animals. However, the lack of a standard quality-control software to detect technical problems represents a potential impediment to comparisons across studies in the field of evolutionary and conservation physiology. Here, we introduce 'FishResp', a versatile R package and its graphical implementation for quality-control and filtering of raw respirometry data.

Selection on the morphology-physiology-performance nexus: Lessons from freshwater stickleback morphs.

Conspecifics inhabiting divergent environments frequently differ in morphology, physiology, and performance, but the interrelationships amongst traits and with Darwinian fitness remains poorly understood. We investigated population differentiation in morphology, metabolic rate, and swimming performance in three-spined sticklebacks ( L.), contrasting a marine/ancestral population with two distinct freshwater morphotypes derived from it: the "typical" low-plated morph, and a unique "small-plated" morph.

Challenges and advances for transcriptome assembly in non-model species.

Analyses of high-throughput transcriptome sequences of non-model organisms are based on two main approaches: de novo assembly and genome-guided assembly using mapping to assign reads prior to assembly. Given the limits of mapping reads to a reference when it is highly divergent, as is frequently the case for non-model species, we evaluate whether using blastn would outperform mapping methods for read assignment in such situations (>15% divergence). We demonstrate its high performance by using simulated reads of lengths corresponding to those generated by the most common sequencing platforms, and over a realistic range of genetic divergence (0% to 30% divergence).

Sticklebacks adapted to divergent osmotic environments show differences in plasticity for kidney morphology and candidate gene expression.

Novel physiological challenges in different environments can promote the evolution of divergent phenotypes, either through plastic or genetic changes. Environmental salinity serves as a key barrier to the distribution of nearly all aquatic organisms, and species diversification is likely to be enabled by adaptation to alternative osmotic environments. The threespine stickleback () is a euryhaline species with populations found both in marine and freshwater environments.