Variation in pelvic morphology has a complex genetic basis and its patterning and specification is governed by conserved developmental pathways. Whether the mechanisms underlying the differentiation and specification of the pelvis also produce the morphological covariation on which natural selection may act is still an open question in evolutionary developmental biology. We use high-resolution Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL) mapping in the F34 generation of an advanced intercross experiment (LG,SM-G34) to characterize the genetic architecture of...

Objectives: Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a most debilitating traumatic injury, and cytotherapy is a promising alternative treatment strategy. Here we investigated the effect and mechanism of adipose-derived stem/stromal cells (ASCs) with overexpressing brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and neurotrophin-3 (NT3) (BDNF-NT3) in combination with silk fibroin/chitosan scaffold (SFCS) in SCI. Methods: Female Sprague-Dawley rats were used as an SCI model. SFCS,SFCS and ASCs, or ASCs overexpressing NT3, BDNF, and BDNF-NT3 were implanted into SCI rats....

Whole-genome duplication has played a central role in genome evolution of many organisms, including the human genome. Most duplicated genes are eliminated and factors that influence the retention of persisting duplicates remain poorly understood. Here, we describe a systematic complex genetic interaction analysis with yeast paralogs derived from the whole-genome duplication event. Mapping digenic interactions for a deletion mutant of each paralog and trigenic interactions for the double mutant provides insight into their roles and...

1. Zinc is a widespread pollutant released from industrial combustion, auto- mobile residue, and mining. Zinc accumulates in soils and mobilises into plant tissue where it may be consumed to potentially toxic levels by leaf feeding insects, including developing pollinators. 2. While zinc tolerance thresholds have been previously assessed in insect pollinators, most observations are limited to model organisms and pest species. We lack understand- ing of zinc tolerance in insects of conservation concern. 3....

The Minnesota Solvation Database consists of a collection of 3037 experimental free energies of solvation or transfer free energies for 790 unique solutes in 92 solvents (including water) and gas-phase M06-2X/MG3S optimized molecular geometries in Cartesian coordinates for the corresponding solutes. All of the 790 solutes in this database (541 neutrals and 249 singly-charged ions) contain at most the following elements: H, C, N, O, F, Si, P, S, Cl, Br, and I.

Human coronavirus NL63 (HCoV-NL63) is primarily associated with common cold in children, elderly and immunocompromised individuals. Outbreaks caused by HCoV-NL63 are rare. Here we report a cluster of HCoV-NL63 cases with severe lower respiratory tract infection that arose in Guangzhou, China, in 2018. Twenty-three hospitalized children were confirmed to be HCoV-NL63 positive, and most of whom were hospitalized with severe pneumonia or acute bronchitis. Whole genomes of HCoV-NL63 were obtained using next-generation sequencing. Phylogenetic and...

Forest fragmentation may negatively affect plants through reduced genetic diversity and increased population structure due to habitat isolation, decreased population size, and disturbance of pollen-seed dispersal mechanisms. However, in the case of tree species, effective pollen-seed dispersal, mating system, and ecological dynamics may help the species overcome the negative effect of forest fragmentation. A fine-scale population genetics study can shed light on the postfragmentation genetic diversity and structure of a species. Here, we present the...

This repository contains data, R code, and associated output from running R code supporting results reported in: Fieberg, J., K. Vitense, and D. H. Johnson 2020. Resampling-Based Methods for Biologists. PeerJ [In Revision]

Adaptation through natural selection may be the only means by which small and fragmented plant populations will persist through present day environmental change. A population’s additive genetic variance for fitness (VA(W)) represents its immediate capacity to adapt to the environment in which it exists. We evaluated this property for a population of the annual legume Chamaecrista fasciculata through a quantitative genetic experiment in the tallgrass prairie region of the Midwest USA, where changing climate is...

In angiosperm self-incompatibility systems, pollen with an allele matching the pollen recipient at the self-incompatibility locus is rejected. Extreme allelic polymorphism is maintained by frequency-dependent selection favoring rare alleles. However, two challenges result in a "chicken-egg"problem for the spread of a new allele (a tightly linked haplotype in this case) under the widespread "collaborative non-self recognition" mechanism. A novel pollen-function mutation alone would merely grant compatibility with a nonexistent style-function allele: a neutral change at...

In December 2019, Wuhan, China suffered a serious outbreak of a novel coronavirus infectious disease (COVID) caused by novel severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (SARS-CoV 2). To quickly identify the pathogen, we designed and screened primer sets, and established a sensitive and specific qRT-PCR assay for SARS-CoV 2; the lower limit of detection (LOD) was 15 (95% CI: 9.8–21) copies per reaction. We combined this qRT-PCR assay with an automatic integration system for nucleic acid...

Eyes have the flexibility to evolve to meet the ecological demands of their users. Relative to camera-type eyes, the fundamental limits of optical diffraction in arthropod compound eyes restricts the ability to resolve fine detail (visual acuity) to much lower degrees. We tested the capacity of several ecological factors to predict arthropod visual acuity, while simultaneously controlling for shared phylogenetic history. In this study, we have generated the most comprehensive review of compound eye visual...

Objective Localization of seizure onset zone in focal epilepsy patients is a crucial step prior to surgical planning. Noninvasively achieving this goal would have a tremendous impact on clinical management of intractable seizure. Methods In a total of 39 focal epilepsy patients, we recorded and extracted 138 seizures and 1,325 interictal epileptic discharges using high-density EEG. We have investigated a novel approach for directly imaging sources of seizures and interictal spikes from high density EEG...

Crocin is the main monomer of saffron, which is a momentous component of traditional Chinese medicine Lang Qing A Ta. Here, we tried to probe into the role of crocin in liver fibrosis. Hematoxylin-eosin staining and Sirius Red staining were used to observe the pathological changes of liver tissues. After hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) were isolated from liver tissues, lnc-LFAR1, MTF-1, GDNF, and α-SMA expressions were detected by qRT-PCR and western blot. Immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence...

Crocin is the main monomer of saffron, which is a momentous component of traditional Chinese medicine Lang Qing A Ta. Here, we tried to probe into the role of crocin in liver fibrosis. Hematoxylin-eosin staining and Sirius Red staining were used to observe the pathological changes of liver tissues. After hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) were isolated from liver tissues, lnc-LFAR1, MTF-1, GDNF, and α-SMA expressions were detected by qRT-PCR and western blot. Immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence...

In the natural world, sex prevails, despite its costs. While much effort has been dedicated to identifying the intrinsic costs of sex (e.g. the cost of males), few studies have identified the ecological fitness consequences of sex. Furthermore, correlated biological traits that differ between sexuals and asexuals may alter these costs, or even render the typical costs of sex irrelevant. We conducted a large-scale multi-site reciprocal transplant using multiple sexual and asexual genotypes of a...

The study of mutualistic interaction networks has led to valuable insights into ecological and evolutionary processes. However, our understanding of network structure may depend upon the temporal scale at which we sample and analyze network data. To date, we lack a comprehensive assessment of the temporal scale-dependence of network structure across a wide range of temporal scales and geographic locations. If network structure is temporally scale-dependent, networks constructed over different temporal scales may provide very...

Shiga toxin (Stx)-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) can cause a wide range of symptoms from asymptomatic carriage, mild diarrhea to bloody diarrhea (BD) and hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). Intimin, encoded by the eae gene, also plays a critical role in STEC pathogenesis. Herein, we investigated the prevalence and genetic diversity of eae among clinical STEC isolates from patients with diarrhea, BD, HUS as well as from asymptomatic STEC-positive individuals in Sweden with whole-genome sequencing. We found...

Migration can allow individuals to escape parasite infection, which can lead to a lower infection probability (prevalence) in a population and/or fewer parasites per individual (intensity). Since individuals with more parasites often have lower survival and/or fecundity, infection intensity shapes the life-history tradeoffs determining when migration is favored as a strategy to escape infection. Yet, most theory relies on susceptible-infected (SI) modeling frameworks, defining individuals as either healthy or infected, ignoring details of infection intensity....

A grand challenge facing humanity is how to produce food for a growing population in the face of a changing climate and environmental degradation. Though empirical evidence remains sparse, management strategies that increase environmental sustainability, like increasing agroecosystem diversity through crop rotations, may also increase resilience to weather extremes without sacrificing yields. We used multilevel regression analyses of long-term crop yield datasets across a continental precipitation gradient to assess how temporal crop diversification affects maize...

1. Camera trap technology has galvanized the study of predator-prey ecology in wild animal communities by expanding the scale and diversity of predator-prey interactions that can be analyzed. While observational data from systematic camera arrays have informed inferences on the spatiotemporal outcomes of predator-prey interactions, the capacity for observational studies to identify mechanistic drivers of species interactions is limited. 2. Experimental study designs that utilize camera traps uniquely allow for testing hypothesized mechanisms that drive...

The primary prey of tigers across much of Southeast Asia has been depleted, reducing the ability of already limited habitat to support tigers. To better understand the extent to which two of the largest prey species, gaur (Bos gaurus) and banteng (Bos javanicus), contribute to the tiger’s diet, we estimated the average size of these species killed by tigers. This information is needed to more accurately calculate biomass of these species in the tiger’s diet...

Relationships of the Neotropical finches in the genera Euphonia and Chlorophonia (Fringillidae: Euphoniinae) have been clarified by recent molecular studies, but species-level relationships within this group have not been thoroughly addressed. In this study, we sampled specimens representing every recognized species of these genera, in addition to 2 outgroup taxa, and used target enrichment to sequence thousands of ultraconserved element (UCE) loci, as well as mitochondrial DNA reconstructed from off-target reads, from each specimen to...

Magnetic, pXRD and Mössbauer metadata used in the cited study on alteration of synthetic ferrihydrite. All magnetic data was collected at the Institute for Rock Magnetism on a Quantum Design MPMS and comprises magnetic susceptibility (in-phase and out-of-phase) as a function of temperature (10-300K) and frequency (1-1000 Hz), hysteresis loops measured at 5K and 300 K, and magnetic remanence data (pTRM, temperature and AF demagnetized, the "goethetite test") collected between 400 and 10 K.

The data contains responses to an interactive survey at the 2016 Minnesota State Fair (N=333), which was used to obtain measurements on food-related behavior and sociodemographic factors. The survey included a conjoint task to elicit food discard tendencies to construct the food waste proxy. The study considered cosmetic deterioration, date labels, implied shelf life, package size, and prices paid, in fresh, packaged spinach and ground beef products.