Publications by authors named "S Ruuskanen"
Article Synopsis
- Maternal hormones, particularly androgens like testosterone, can significantly influence the physiological and behavioral traits of offspring, affecting them differently based on their sex.
- A study involving wild great tit eggs demonstrated that increasing yolk testosterone reduced begging behavior and altered fledging mass while also leading to sex-specific changes in DNA methylation at 763 specific sites linked to growth and reproduction.
- These findings imply that maternal testosterone influences offspring traits through changes in DNA methylation, highlighting the need for further research to determine if these effects persist beyond the early life stage and influence overall fitness.
An organism's response to its environment is largely determined by changes in the energy supplied by aerobic mitochondrial metabolism via adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production. ATP is especially important under energy-demanding conditions, such as during rapid growth. It is currently poorly understood how environmental factors influence energy metabolism and mitochondrial functioning, but recent studies suggest the role of thyroid hormones (TH).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnvironmental variation can shape the gut microbiome, but broad/large-scale data on among and within-population heterogeneity in the gut microbiome and the associated environmental factors of wild populations is lacking. Furthermore, previous studies have limited taxonomical coverage, and knowledge about wild avian gut microbiomes is still scarce. We investigated large-scale environmental variation in the gut microbiome of wild adult great tits across the species' European distribution range.
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