Twenty-nine forest sites in six sampling areas in the Banat region of Romania, adjacent to Serbia, were sampled to obtain inventories of their snail faunas and to make comparisons between these and previously studied faunas in the mountains from the Sudetes in the north-west to the Southern Transylvanian Carpathians in the south. 65 species were recorded overall, with between 13 and 33 at individual sites. Among the six sampling areas that on Schist rock at...

The mutualistic versus antagonistic nature of an interaction is defined by costs and benefits of each partner, which may vary depending on the environment. Contrasting with this dynamic view, several pollination interactions are considered as strictly obligate and mutualistic. Here, we focus on the interaction between Trollius europaeus and Chiastocheta flies, considered as a specialized and obligate nursery pollination system – the flies are thought to be exclusive pollinators of the plant and their larvae...

Aim: The location of glacial refugia and the timing of postglacial colonisations remain of interest because together they inform about the ability of species to track shifting climates. In the associated paper, we tested a hypothesis that a central European forest land snail species survived in a northern refugium, which was proposed based on fossil finds indirectly dated to the Last Glacial Maximum and Late Glacial. We assessed the credibility of our results by comparing...

Imperfect detection in field studies on animal abundance, including birds, is common and can be corrected for in various ways. The binomial N-mixture (hereafter binmix) model developed for this task is widely used in ecological studies owing to its simplicity: it requires replicated count results as the input. However, it may overestimate abundance and be sensitive to even small violations of its assumptions. We used a 33-year dataset on the Marsh Tit, Poecile palustris, a...

Under incomplete reproductive isolation, secondary contact of diverged allopatric lineages may form hybrid zones that allow to study recombinants over several generations as excellent systems of genomic interactions, resulting from the evolutionary forces, acting on certain genes and phenotypes. Hybrid phenotypes are expected to either exhibit intermediacy or, alternatively, transgressive traits, which exceed the extremes of their parents due to epistasis and segregation of complementary alleles. While transgressive morphotypes have been examined in fish, reptiles,...

Additional file 1. Dataset of the study.

Additional file 2: Detailed data on the analyzed variant NM_001166118.3: c.444_446delGTT detected WES and analyzed using Ingenuity Variant Analysis plugin (QIAGEN, CA, USA).

Additional file 3: Statistically significant differences in gene expression were detected using RNA-Seq for 9 transcripts, whose expression was decreased only for patient RK vs the healthy control (CtrlH). Statistical significance was accepted as a p-value of < 0.05 used for most analyzes besides NGS analysis where the FDR corrected p-value, q-value of < 0.05 was considered as significant.

Additional file 3: Statistically significant differences in gene expression were detected using RNA-Seq for 9 transcripts, whose expression was decreased only for patient RK vs the healthy control (CtrlH). Statistical significance was accepted as a p-value of < 0.05 used for most analyzes besides NGS analysis where the FDR corrected p-value, q-value of < 0.05 was considered as significant.

Additional file 2: Detailed data on the analyzed variant NM_001166118.3: c.444_446delGTT detected WES and analyzed using Ingenuity Variant Analysis plugin (QIAGEN, CA, USA).

Occasional XY recombination is a proposed explanation for the sex-chromosome homomorphy in European tree frogs. Numerous laboratory crosses, however, failed to detect any event of male recombination, and a detailed survey of NW-European Hyla arborea populations identified male-specific alleles at sex-linked loci, pointing to the absence of XY recombination in their recent history. Here we address this paradox in a phylogeographic framework, by genotyping sex-linked microsatellite markers in populations and sibships from the entire species...

According to the good genes hypothesis and energy allocation theory, human adult body height may reflect biological quality. An important aspect of this quality is immune system functioning (ISF). The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between ISF and body height in healthy people. The ISF was determined by several important innate (total complement and lysozyme activity, neutrophils function) and adaptive immune parameters (lymphocytes, IgA and IgG, and response to flu vaccine)....

NOTICE: The Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Journal of Experimental Botany have taken the decision to retract the article related to this dataset due to concern over image manipulation and duplication. Please note, Dryad cannot verify whether the underlying data published is reliable for reuse. Visit this link to view the retraction notice and concerns raised: https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/ery342 Members of the cation diffusion facilitator family have been identified in all kingdoms of life. They have been divided...

Human culture, biology, and health were shaped dramatically by the onset of agriculture ~12,000 years before present (BP). This shift is hypothesized to have resulted in increased individual fitness and population growth as evidenced by archaeological and population genomic data alongside a decline in physiological health as inferred from skeletal remains. Here, we consider osteological and ancient DNA data from the same prehistoric individuals to study human stature variation as a proxy for health across...

Organisms provide some of the most sensitive indicators of climate change and evolutionary responses are becoming apparent in species with short generation times. Large datasets on genetic polymorphism that can provide an historical benchmark against which to test for recent evolutionary responses are very rare, but an exception is found in the brown-lipped banded snail (Cepaea nemoralis). This species is sensitive to its thermal environment and exhibits several polymorphisms of shell colour and banding pattern...

Reproductive isolation is crucial for the process of speciation to progress. Sex chromosomes have been assigned a key role in driving reproductive isolation but empirical evidence from natural population processes has been restricted to organisms with degenerated sex chromosomes such as mammals and birds. Here we report restricted introgression at sex-linked compared to autosomal markers in a hybrid zone between two incipient species of European tree frog, Hyla arborea and H. orientalis, whose homologous X...

Data which were created during the research in the ornamentation of the Mesolithic harpoon head from the Police archaeological site in Pomerania, NW Poland. They were developed during the work on an article which describes the application of X-ray computed tomography to the recording and analysis of ornaments on the Mesolithic harpoon found at Police in NW Poland, entitled "APPLICATION OF COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY TO THE STUDY OF MESOLITHIC PORTABLE ART: RESULTS, INTERPRETATIONS AND EXPECTATIONS –...

Additional file 1. Dataset of the study.

Woody species’ requirements and environmental sensitivity change from seedlings to adults, a process referred to as ontogenetic shift. Such shifts can be increased by climate change. To assess the changes in the difference of temperature experienced by seedlings and adults in the context of climate change, it is essential to have reliable climatic data over long periods that capture the thermal conditions experienced by the individuals throughout their life cycle. Here we used a unique...

Microbiome constitutes and important axis of individual variation that, together with genes and the environment, influences an individual’s physiology and fitness. Microbiomes are dependent not only on an individual’s body condition but also on external factors, such as diet or stress levels, and as such can be involved into feedbacks between the external ecological factors and internal physiology. In our study we used a wild population of blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) to investigate the impact...

Aim: Biogeographic regionalization is scant for most insect groups due to shortfalls in distribution and phylogenetic information, namely the Wallacean and Darwinian shortfalls respectively. Here, we focused on the European ants and compared new techniques to classical analyses based on regional lists and taxonomic methods. We asked the following: 1) Can grid-based regionalizations using novel distribution data improve biogeographic transitions? and 2) Can phylogenetic approaches reveal new insights regarding ant evolutionary history? Location: Europe and...