Paternal care plasticity: males care more for early- than late-developing embryos in an arboreal breeding treefrog.

Background: Parental care benefits offspring but comes with costs. To optimize the trade-off of costs and benefits, parents should adjust care based on intrinsic and/or extrinsic conditions. The harm to offspring hypothesis suggests that parents should invest more in younger offspring than older offspring because younger offspring are more vulnerable.

Prediction of linear B-cell epitopes based on protein sequence features and BERT embeddings.

Linear B-cell epitopes (BCEs) play a key role in the development of peptide vaccines and immunodiagnostic reagents. Therefore, the accurate identification of linear BCEs is of great importance in the prevention of infectious diseases and the diagnosis of related diseases. The experimental methods used to identify BCEs are both expensive and time-consuming and they do not meet the demand for identification of large-scale protein sequence data.

Copper(II) complex enhanced chemodynamic therapy through GSH depletion and autophagy flow blockade.

Three copper(II) complexes C1-C3 were synthesized and fully characterized as chemodynamic therapy (CDT) anticancer agents. C1-C3 showed greater cytotoxicity than their ligands toward SK-OV-3 and T24 cells. Particularly, C2 showed high cytotoxicity toward T24 cells and low cytotoxicity toward normal human HL-7702 and WI-38 cells.

Endurance rivalry and female choice jointly influence male mating success in the emerald treefrog (Zhangixalus prasinatus), a lek-chorusing anuran.

Background: Endurance rivalry and female choice are two important mechanisms of sexual selection in lek-breeding species. Endurance rivalry is when males compete for opportunities to mate by spending more time in leks than others (interaction-independent male-male competition). Because high-quality males can afford to have high lek attendance, females have a higher chance of mating with good-quality males even when they mate randomly.

Geographic genetic structure in two laticaudine sea kraits, Laticauda laticaudata and Laticauda semifasciata (Serpentes: Elapidae), in the Ryukyu-Taiwan region as inferred from mitochondrial cytochrome b sequences.

The Ryukyu-Taiwan region is an island arch with intervening waters of varying distances and depths. This study examines the geographic genetic structure of two sympatric sea kraits, Laticauda laticaudata and L. semifasciata, in the region, to infer factors affecting the extent of dispersal and other biogeographical traits of these amphibious reptiles.