Phenotypic responses to temperature in the ciliate .

Understanding the effects of temperature on ecological and evolutionary processes is crucial for generating future climate adaptation scenarios. Using experimental evolution, we evolved the model ciliate in an initially novel high temperature environment for more than 35 generations, closely monitoring population dynamics and morphological changes. We observed initially long lag phases in the high temperature environment that over about 26 generations reduced to no lag phase, a strong reduction in cell size and modifications in cell shape at high temperature.

Revised time scales of RNA virus evolution based on spatial information.

The time scales of pathogen evolution are of major concern in the context of public and veterinary health, epidemiology and evolutionary biology. Dating the emergence of a pathogen often relies on estimates of evolutionary rates derived from nucleotide sequence data. For many viruses, this has yielded estimates of evolutionary origins only a few hundred years in the past.

Spatiotemporal dynamics of Puumala hantavirus associated with its rodent host, Myodes glareolus.

Many viruses significantly impact human and animal health. Understanding the population dynamics of these viruses and their hosts can provide important insights for epidemiology and virus evolution. Puumala virus (PUUV) is a European hantavirus that may cause regional outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome in humans.

Complete genome of a Puumala virus strain from Central Europe.

Puumala virus (PUUV) is one of the predominant hantavirus species in Europe causing mild to moderate cases of haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. Parts of Lower Saxony in north-western Germany are endemic for PUUV infections. In this study, the complete PUUV genome sequence of a bank vole-derived tissue sample from the 2007 outbreak was determined by a combined primer-walking and RNA ligation strategy.