Publications by authors named "W P Breed"

Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how varying levels of sperm competition affect the evolution of reproductive traits and genes in mice and rats (Murinae), focusing on 78 species.
  • Researchers discovered that species with smaller testes mass tend to experience relaxations in evolutionary pressures, leading to faster molecular evolution of genes related to sperm production.
  • The findings highlight the impact of postcopulatory sexual selection on male reproductive evolution and suggest that certain genetic changes could be linked to male fertility.
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Background: Chemotherapy-induced alopecia is a common consequence of cancer treatment with a high psychological impact on patients and can be prevented by scalp cooling (SC). With this multi-center patient series, we examined the results for multiple currently used chemotherapy regimens to offer an audit into the real-world determinants of SC efficacy.

Materials And Methods: The Dutch Scalp Cooling Registry collected data on 7424 scalp-cooled patients in 68 Dutch hospitals.

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Phylogeographic studies of continental clades, especially when combined with palaeoclimate modelling, provide powerful insight into how environment drives speciation across climatic contexts. Australia, a continent characterized by disparate modern biomes and dynamic climate change, provides diverse opportunity to reconstruct the impact of past and present environments on diversification. Here, we use genomic-scale data (1310 exons and whole mitogenomes from 111 samples) to investigate Pleistocene diversification, cryptic diversity, and secondary contact in the Australian delicate mice (Hydromyini: Pseudomys), a recent radiation spanning almost all Australian environments.

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It remains unclear how variation in the intensity of sperm competition shapes phenotypic and molecular evolution across clades. Mice and rats in the subfamily Murinae are a rapid radiation exhibiting incredible diversity in sperm morphology and production. We combined phenotypic and genomic data to perform phylogenetic comparisons of male reproductive traits and genes across 78 murine species.

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Context: Sperm morphology varies greatly across mammalian species and this variability is especially evident in murid rodents with both sperm head shape and tail length being sexually selected traits. The Palawan spiny rat, Maxomys panglima has a longer sperm tail than that currently recorded for any other mammalian species.

Aims: The aim of the current study was to determine the sperm morphology of an individual Palawan spiny rat, M.

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