Publications by authors named "Timo J B Van Eldijk"
Objectives: Environmental conditions can influence mutation rates in bacteria. Fever is a common response to infection that alters the growth conditions of infecting bacteria. Here we examine how a temperature change, such as is associated with fever, affects the mutation rate towards antibiotic resistance.
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- Microbiomes play crucial roles in essential processes like immune response, digestion, and detoxification, directly affecting an organism's fitness.
- An evolutionary experiment with genetically altered two-spotted spider mites was conducted to investigate how their microbiome changes when adapting to new host plants.
- Findings revealed a strong correlation between the spider mites' performance (like egg-laying and longevity) on new plants and the composition of their microbiome, suggesting that understanding these bacterial communities can help explain species performance across different resources.
'Evolvability' - the ability to undergo adaptive evolution - is a key concept for understanding and predicting the response of biological systems to environmental change. Evolvability has various facets and is applied in many ways, easily leading to misunderstandings among researchers. To clarify matters, we first categorize the mechanisms and organismal features underlying evolvability into determinants providing variation, determinants shaping the effect of variation on fitness, and determinants shaping the selection process.
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- Reverse evolution can occur through plasticity in trait expression, as demonstrated by the parasitic wasp Leptopilina heterotoma, which can switch fat synthesis on or off depending on environmental conditions.
- Researchers found that this wasp activates fat production in low-fat environments and shuts it down in high-fat environments, indicating that fat synthesis hasn’t truly been lost but can be toggled based on need.
- Genetic analysis of related parasitoid species and simulations suggests that many of them might also exhibit plasticity in fat synthesis, implying that apparent losses of traits may actually be reversible adaptations to varying environments.
On the basis of an assemblage of fossilized wing scales recovered from latest Triassic and earliest Jurassic sediments from northern Germany, we provide the earliest evidence for Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies). The diverse scales confirm a (Late) Triassic radiation of lepidopteran lineages, including the divergence of the Glossata, the clade that comprises the vast multitude of extant moths and butterflies that have a sucking proboscis. The microfossils extend the minimum calibrated age of glossatan moths by ca.
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