Portal project

Gaussian Calculation

Portal project

A FAIR Data project involving the design and deployment of a data repository containing enhanced features.

Crocodyliforms have a much richer evolutionary history than represented by their extant descendants, including several independent marine and terrestrial radiations during the Mesozoic. However, heterogeneous sampling of their fossil record has obscured their macroevolutionary dynamics, and obfuscated attempts to reconcile external drivers of these patterns. Here, we present a comprehensive analysis of crocodyliform biodiversity through the Jurassic/Cretaceous (J/K) transition using subsampling and phylogenetic approaches and apply maximum-likelihood methods to fit models of extrinsic variables to...

Parasites play a role in the control of transient algal blooms, but it is not known whether parasite-mediated selection results in coevolution of the host and the parasites over this short time span. We investigated the presence of coevolution between the toxic dinoflagellate Alexandrium minutum and two naturally occurring endoparasites during blooms lasting a month in two river estuaries, using cross-inoculation experiments across time and space. Higher parasite abundance was associated with a large daily...

Quantifying the role of biodiversity in ecosystems not only requires understanding the links between species and the ecological functions and services they provide, but also how these factors relate to measurable indices, such as functional traits and phylogenetic diversity. However, these relationships remain poorly understood, especially for heterotrophic organisms within complex ecological networks. Here, we assemble data on avian traits across a global sample of mutualistic plant–frugivore networks to critically assess how the functional roles...

Analyses of living and fossil taxa are crucial for understanding biodiversity through time. The total evidence method allows living and fossil taxa to be combined in phylogenies, using molecular data for living taxa and morphological data for living and fossil taxa. With this method, substantial overlap of coded anatomical characters among living and fossil taxa is vital for accurately inferring topology. However, although molecular data for living species are widely available, scientists generating morphological data...

The colossal size and body plan of sauropod dinosaurs are unparalleled in terrestrial vertebrates. However, to date, there have been only limited attempts to examine temporal and phylogenetic patterns in the sauropod bauplan. Here, we combine three-dimensional computational models with phylogenetic reconstructions to quantify the evolution of whole-body shape and body segment properties across the sauropod radiation. Limitations associated with the absence of soft tissue preservation in fossils result in large error bars about mean...

There is substantial variation in the relapse frequency of Plasmodium vivax malaria, with fast relapsing strains in tropical areas, and slow relapsing strains in temperate areas with seasonal transmission. We hypothesise that much of the phenotypic diversity in P. vivax relapses arises from selection of relapse frequency to optimise transmission potential in a given environment, in a process similar to the virulence trade-off hypothesis. We develop mathematical models of P. vivax transmission and calculate the...

Antibiotic resistance often evolves by mutations at conserved sites in essential genes, resulting in parallel molecular evolution between divergent bacterial strains and species. Whether these resistance mutations are having parallel effects on fitness across bacterial taxa, however, is unclear. This is an important point to address, because the fitness effects of resistance mutations play a key role in the spread and maintenance of resistance in pathogen populations. We address this idea by measuring the fitness...

Following environmental changes, communities disassemble and reassemble in seemingly unpredictable ways. Whether species respond to such changes individualistically or collectively (e.g. as functional groups) is still unclear. To address this question, we used an extensive new dataset for the lake communities in the Azores' archipelago to test whether: 1) individual species respond concordantly within trophic groups; 2) trophic groups respond concordantly to biogeographic and environmental gradients. Spatial concordance in individual species distributions within trophic groups...

The rapid rise of antibiotic resistance has renewed interest in phage therapy – the use of bacteria-specific viruses (phages) to treat bacterial infections. Even though phages are often pathogen-specific, little is known about the efficiency and eco-evolutionary outcomes of phage therapy in polymicrobial infections. We studied this experimentally by exposing both quorum sensing (QS) signalling PAO1 and QS-deficient lasR Pseudomonas aeruginosa genotypes (differing in their ability to signal intra-specifically) to lytic PT7 phage in the...

There is growing evidence that parallel molecular evolution is common, but its causes remain poorly understood. Demographic parameters such as population bottlenecks are predicted to be major determinants of parallelism. Here, we test the hypothesis that bottleneck intensity shapes parallel evolution by elucidating the genomic basis of adaptation to antibiotic-supplemented media in hundreds of populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens Pf0-1. As expected, bottlenecking decreased the rate of phenotypic and molecular adaptation. Surprisingly, bottlenecking had...

1. Evaluations of wildlife population dynamics have the potential to convey valuable information on the type of pressure affecting a population and could help predict future changes in the population's trajectory. Greater understanding of different patterns of population declines could provide a useful mechanism for assessing decline severity in the wild and identifying those populations that are more likely to exhibit severe declines. 2. We identified 93 incidences of decline within 75 populations of mammalian...

Portal project

Gaussian Calculation

A set of 130 digital precipitation maps of the tropical Andes, covering Colombia, Ecuador and Peru at a 5km resolution. The maps represent different realizations of mean precipitation totals of the period 1981-2010 using different satellite-gauge merging methods. The work draws on a large database of 723 rain gauges and the full 5km Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Precipitation Radar (TPR) record from 1998 to 2014. Each map is approximately 1MB

Gaussian Calculation

Gaussian Calculation

Gaussian Calculation

Gaussian Calculation

Gaussian Calculation

Gaussian Calculation, b3lyp/def2tzvpp/scrf=(cpcm,solvent=dichloromethane) empiricaldispersion=gd3bj method.

Gaussian Calculation, b3lyp/def2tzvpp/scrf=(cpcm,solvent=dichloromethane) empiricaldispersion=gd3bj method.