Due to their effects on reducing recombination, chromosomal inversions may play an important role in speciation by establishing and/or maintaining linked blocks of genes causing reproductive isolation (RI) between populations. This view fits empirical data indicating that inversions typically harbour loci involved in RI. However, previous computer simulations of infinite populations with 2-4 loci involved in RI implied that, even with gene flux as low as 10^(-8) per gamete, per generation between alternative arrangements, inversions...

During male-male competition, evolution can favor alternative reproductive tactics. This often results in a dominant morph that holds a resource, such as a nest for egg laying, competes with a smaller sneaker morph that reproduces by stealing fertilizations. The salinity environment can influence male growth rates, e.g. via osmoregulatory costs, which in turn may influence the use of sneaker tactics for small males competing for mating opportunities. Salinity can also affect sperm directly; however, little...

Motivation: A species’ diet is central to understanding many aspects of its biology, including its behaviour, movement, and ecological niche. The diets of terrestrial carnivorous mammals, defined here as species primarily consuming other mammals (hereafter, mammal-consumers), have been extensively studied and can vary in the proportion of different food types, and species, consumed across their geographic ranges. Accessibility to data capturing such variation in diets of mammal-consumers across the variety of ecosystems they occur in...

Chromosomal inversion polymorphisms, segments of chromosomes that are flipped in orientation and occur in reversed order in some individuals, have long been recognized to play an important role in local adaptation. They can reduce recombination in heterozygous individuals and thus help to maintain sets of locally adapted alleles. In a wide range of organisms, populations adapted to different habitats differ in frequency of inversion arrangements. However, getting a full understanding of the importance of inversions...

Approximately half of all fishes have, in addition to the luminal venous O2 supply, a coronary circulation supplying the heart with fully oxygenated blood. Yet, it is not fully understood how coronary O2 delivery affects tolerance to environmental extremes such as warming and hypoxia. Hypoxia reduces arterial oxygenation, while warming increases overall tissue O2 demand. Thus, as both stressors are associated with reduced venous O2 supply to the heart, we hypothesised that coronary flow benefits...

Human induced environmental change may require rapid adaptation of plant populations and crops, but the genomic basis of environmental adaptation remain poorly understood. We analyzed polymorphic loci from the perennial crop Medicago sativa (alfalfa or lucerne) and the annual legume model species M. truncatula to search for a common set of candidate genes that might contribute to adaptation to abiotic stress in both annual and perennial Medicago species. We identified a set of candidate genes...

This project contains data for the manuscript Intra-specific variation in metal tolerance modulate competition between two marine diatoms. The experiments tests how different toxic concentrations of heavy metals modulates competition between an artificially assembled community of Baltic Sea diatoms (four clonal strains each of the two diatom species Skeletonema marinoi (SM) and Thalassiosira baltica (TB). Briefly we use toxic Dose Response curves (DRC) to model how inter and intra specific selection between strains is expected...

Motivation: Body mass is one of the most important determinants of animal ecology. Unlike other important traits it is also readily inferable from fossils and it is therefore one of the only traits that can be directly analyzed and compared between fossil and contemporary communities. Despite this, no comprehensive database of the body mass of larger clades of extinct species exists. Analysis of fossils has therefore been restricted to small clades or to smaller, potentially...

For externally fertilising organisms in the aquatic environment, the abiotic fertilisation medium can be a strong selecting force. Among bony fishes, sperm are adapted to function in a narrow salinity range. A notable exception is the family Gobiidae, where several species reproduce across a wide salinity range. The family also contains several wide-spread invasive species. To better understand how these fishes tolerate such varying conditions, we measured sperm performance in relation to salinity from a...

To describe challenges of translating and culturally adapting the Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioural Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Screen into Norwegian (ECAS-N), evaluate its content validity; provide age- and education-balanced norms for verbal fluency and cut-off values for abnormal performance. Translation to Norwegian and back-translation to English complied with standard methods. Patients and ALS experts evaluated the relevance, comprehensiveness and comprehensibility of the translated ECAS (ECAS-N). Content validity indexes at the item level (I-CVI), scale level...

Balancing selection is one of the mechanisms which has been proposed to explain the maintenance of genetic diversity in species across generations. For species with large populations and complex life histories, however, heterogeneous selection pressures may create a scenario in which the net effects of selection are balanced across developmental stages. With replicated cultures and a pooled sequencing approach, we show that genotype-dependent mortality in larvae of the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas) is largely temporally...

Mercury, Hg, is one of the most problematic metals from an environmental perspective. To assess the problems caused by Hg in the environment it is crucial to understand the processes of Hg biogeochemistry, but the exchange of Hg between the atmosphere and vegetation is not sufficiently well characterised. We explored the mercury concentration, [Hg], in foliage from a diverse set of plant types, locations and sampling periods to study whether there is a continuous accumulation...

Background: Marine fish populations are often characterized by high levels of gene flow and correspondingly low genetic divergence. This presents a challenge to define management units. Goldsinny wrasse (Ctenolabrus rupestris) is a heavily exploited species due to its importance as a cleaner-fish in commercial salmonid aquaculture. However, at the present, the population genetic structure of this species is still largely unresolved. Here, full-genome sequencing was used to produce the first genomic reference for this species,...

Aim: The few fish species able to reproduce across wide osmotic ranges either plastically acclimate sperm performance to, or are locally adapted to, different salinities. The invasive round goby (Neogobius melanostomus) is spreading in Eurasia and the Americas, into both fresh and brackish water. We aim to understand if reproduction in different salinities is affected an ability to acclimate. Location: Brackish and freshwater systems of northern Europe and the Baltic Sea. Methods: We cross-exposed round...

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) is a widely used tool for overcoming the low intrinsic sensitivity of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and imaging. Its practical applicability is typically bounded, however, by the so-called ‘spin diffusion barrier’, which relates to the poor efficiency of polarization transfer from highly polarized nuclei close to paramagnetic centers to bulk nuclei. A quantitative assessment of this barrier has been hindered so far by the lack of general methods for studying nuclear-polarization...

Previous theoretical work on range expansions over heterogeneous environments showed that there is a critical environmental gradient where range expansion stops. For populations with freely recombining loci underlying the trait under selection (hereafter adaptive loci), the critical gradient in one-dimensional habitats depends on the fitness cost of dispersal, and the strength of selection relative to genetic drift. Here, we extend the previous work in two directions and ask: What is the role of the recombination...

Aim Seabirds are heavily threatened by anthropogenic activities and their conservation status is deteriorating rapidly. Yet, these pressures are unlikely to uniformly impact all species. It remains an open question if seabirds with similar ecological roles are responding similarly to human pressures. Here we aim to: 1) test whether threatened vs non-threatened seabirds are separated in trait space; 2) quantify the similarity of species’ roles (redundancy) per IUCN Red List Category; and 3) identify traits...

These data and scripts form the basis for Kvarnemo C, Andersson SE, Elisson J, Moore GI and Jones AG (2021). Home range use in the West Australian seahorse Hippocampus subelongatus is influenced by sex and partner's home range but not by body size or paired status. Journal of Ethology 39: 235–248. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10164-021-00698-y. The abstract below is from this paper: Genetic monogamy is the rule for many species of seahorse, including the West Australian seahorse Hippocampus...

The adaptive capacity of marine calcifiers to ocean acidification (OA) is a topic of great interest to evolutionary biologists and ecologists. Previous studies have provided evidence to suggest that larval resilience to high pCO­2 seawater for these species is a trait with a genetic basis and variability in natural populations. To date, however, it remains unclear how the selective effects of OA occur within the context of complex genetic interactions underpinning larval development in many...

We study the optical-pump induced ultrafast transient change of the X-ray absorption at the L_3 absorption resonances of the transition metals Ni and Fe in Fe_{0.5}Ni_{0.5} alloy. We find the effect for both elements to occur simultaneously on a femtosecond timescale. This effect may hence be used as a handy cross-correlation scheme providing a time-zero reference for ultrafast optical-pump soft X-ray-probe measurement. The method benefits from a relatively simple experimental setup as the sample itself...

Coronary arteriosclerosis is a common feature of both wild and farmed salmonid fishes and may be linked to stress-induced cardiac pathologies. Yet, the plasticity and capacity for long-term myocardial restructuring and recovery following a restriction in coronary blood supply is unknown. Here, we analyzed the consequences of acute (3 days) and chronic (from 33 to 62 days) coronary occlusion (i.e., coronary artery ligation) on cardiac morphological characteristics and in vivo function in juvenile rainbow trout,...

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most fatal malignancy, and despite extensive treatment, tumors inevitably recur. This study aimed to identify recurrence-associated molecules in GBM. The gene expression profile GSE139533, containing 70 primary and 47 recurrent GBM tissues and their corresponding clinical traits, was downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database and used for weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) and differentially expressed gene (DEG) analysis. After identifying the hub genes which differentially expressed in...

Aquatic hypoxia will become increasingly prevalent in the future as a result of eutrophication combined with climate warming. While short-term warming typically constrains fish hypoxia tolerance, many fishes cope with warming by adjusting physiological traits through thermal acclimation. Yet, little is known about how such adjustments affect tolerance to hypoxia. We examined European perch (Perca fluviatilis) from the Biotest enclosure (23°C, Biotest population), a unique ∼1 km2 ecosystem artificially warmed by cooling water from a...

Prinias (Cisticolidae: Prinia) are resident warblers of open areas across Africa and Asia and include many polytypic species whose species limits have not been seriously reevaluated recently. Based on an integrative taxonomic analysis of morphology, song, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), we suggest that 2 species should be recognized in the Graceful Prinia (Prinia gracilis) complex. In addition, our morphological analyses show the existence of a well-marked undescribed form in southeastern Somalia, which we name herein...

Background: The great diversity in plant genome size and chromosome number is partly due to polyploidization (i.e., genome doubling events). The differences in genome size and chromosome number among diploid plant species can be a window into the intriguing phenomenon of past genome doubling that may be obscured through time by the process of diploidization. The genus Hibiscus L. (Malvaceae) has a wide diversity of chromosome numbers and a complex genomic history. Hibiscus is ideal...