Impacts of Selective Predation on Infection Prevalence and Host Susceptibility.

Predation can alter diverse ecological processes, including host-parasite interactions. Selective predation, whereby predators preferentially feed on certain prey types, can affect prey density and selective pressures. Studies on selective predation in infected populations have primarily focused on predators preferentially feeding on infected prey.

Genomic Diversity as a Key Conservation Criterion: Proof-of-Concept From Mammalian Whole-Genome Resequencing Data.

Many international, national, state, and local organizations prioritize the ranking of threatened and endangered species to help direct conservation efforts. For example, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assesses the Green Status of species and publishes the influential Red List of threatened species. Unfortunately, such conservation yardsticks do not explicitly consider genetic or genomic diversity (GD), even though GD is positively associated with contemporary evolutionary fitness, individual viability, and with future evolutionary potential.

Code sharing in ecology and evolution increases citation rates but remains uncommon.

Biologists increasingly rely on computer code to collect and analyze their data, reinforcing the importance of published code for transparency, reproducibility, training, and a basis for further work. Here, we conduct a literature review estimating temporal trends in code sharing in ecology and evolution publications since 2010, and test for an influence of code sharing on citation rate. We find that code is rarely published (only 6% of papers), with little improvement over time.

A chemical genetic screen with the EXO70 inhibitor Endosidin2 uncovers potential modulators of exocytosis in Arabidopsis.

Exocytosis plays an essential role in delivering proteins, lipids, and cell wall polysaccharides to the plasma membrane and extracellular spaces. Accurate secretion through exocytosis is key to normal plant development as well as responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. During exocytosis, an octameric protein complex named the exocyst facilitates the tethering of secretory vesicles to the plasma membrane.

Transformation and regeneration of DNA polymerase Θ mutant rice plants.

T-DNA integration into the plant genome is essential for the process of transgenesis and is widely used for genome engineering. The importance of the non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) protein DNA polymerase Θ, encoded by the gene, for T-DNA integration is controversial, with some groups claiming it is essential whereas others claim T-DNA integration in and rice mutant plant tissue. Because of pleiotropic effects of PolQ loss on plant development, scientists have previously had difficulty regenerating transgenic mutant plants.

Dispersive currents explain patterns of population connectivity in an ecologically and economically important fish.

How to identify the drivers of population connectivity remains a fundamental question in ecology and evolution. Answering this question can be challenging in aquatic environments where dynamic lake and ocean currents coupled with high levels of dispersal and gene flow can decrease the utility of modern population genetic tools. To address this challenge, we used RAD-Seq to genotype 959 yellow perch (), a species with an ~40-day pelagic larval duration (PLD), collected from 20 sites circumscribing Lake Michigan.

Negative frequency dependent selection unites ecology and evolution.

From genes to communities, understanding how diversity is maintained remains a fundamental question in biology. One challenging to identify, yet potentially ubiquitous, mechanism for the maintenance of diversity is negative frequency dependent selection (NFDS), which occurs when entities (e.g.

Population-level lateralization of boxing displays enhances fighting success in male Great Himalayan leaf-nosed bats.

Behavioral lateralization with left- and right-hand use is common in the Animal Kingdom and can be advantageous for social species. The existence of a preferential use of the hands during agonistic interactions has been described for a number of invertebrate and vertebrate species. Bats compose the second largest order of mammals.

Infection with is common in tropical lowland habitats: Implications for amphibian conservation.

Numerous species of amphibians declined in Central America during the 1980s and 1990s. These declines mostly affected highland stream amphibians and have been primarily linked to chytridiomycosis, a deadly disease caused by the chytrid fungus (Bd). Since then, the majority of field studies on Bd in the Tropics have been conducted in midland and highland environments (>800 m) mainly because the environmental conditions of mountain ranges match the range of ideal abiotic conditions for Bd in the laboratory.

Genetic diversity in fishes is influenced by habitat type and life-history variation.

Populations of fishes are increasingly threatened by over-exploitation, pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change. In order to better understand the factors that can explain the amount of genetic diversity in wild populations of fishes, we collected estimates of genetic diversity (mean heterozygosity and mean rarefied number of alleles per locus) along with habitat associations, conservation status, and life-history information for 463 fish species. We ran a series of phylogenetic generalized least squares models to determine which factors influence genetic diversity in fishes after accounting for shared evolutionary history among related taxa.