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...

The tree of life of fishes is in a state of flux because we still lack a comprehensive phylogeny that includes all major groups. The situation is most critical for a large clade of spiny-finned fishes, traditionally referred to as percomorphs, whose uncertain relationships have plagued ichthyologists for over a century. Most of what we know about the higher-level relationships among fish lineages has been based on morphology, but rapid influx of molecular studies is...

Understanding the boundaries of breeding populations is of great importance for conservation efforts and estimates of extinction risk for threatened species. However, determining these boundaries can be difficult when population structure is subtle. Emperor penguins are highly reliant on sea ice, and some populations may be in jeopardy as climate change alters sea-ice extent and quality. An understanding of emperor penguin population structure is therefore urgently needed. Two previous studies have differed in their conclusions,...

Climate change is expected to systematically alter the distribution and population dynamics of species around the world. The effects are expected to be particularly strong at high latitudes and elevations, and for ectothermic species with small ranges and limited movement potential, such as salamanders in the southern Appalachian Mountains. In this study, we sought to establish baseline abundance estimates for plethodontid salamanders (family: Plethodontidae) over an elevational gradient in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In...

Loss and reduction of paired appendages is common in vertebrate evolution. How often does such convergent evolution depend on similar developmental and genetic pathways? For example, many populations of the Threespine Stickleback and Ninespine Stickleback (Gasterosteidae) have independently evolved pelvic reduction, usually based on independent mutations that caused reduced Pitx1 expression. Reduced Pitx1 expression has also been implicated in pelvic reduction in manatees. Thus, hind limb reduction stemming from reduced Pitx1 expression has arisen independently...

High-fat diet (HFD) can cause obesity, inducing dysregulation of the visceral adipose tissue (VAT). This study aimed to explore potential biological pathways and hub genes involved in obese VAT, and for that, bioinformatic analysis of multiple datasets was performed. The expression profiles (GSE30247, GSE167311 and GSE79434) were downloaded from Gene Expression Omnibus. Overlapping differentially expressed genes (ODEGs) between normal diet and HFD groups in GSE30247 and GSE167311 were selected to run protein–protein interaction network, GO...

We collected sediment cores from three alpine lakes in Utah, United States, to isolate dormant Daphnia eggs for a resurrection ecology experiment. Our question was whether radioactive fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s and 1960s caused increased mutation rates and population evolution in Daphnia. That work is ongoing. Here, we publish radioisotope dating profiles from our sediment cores.

The body armor of ankylosaurians is a unique morphological feature among dinosaurs. Despite being studied for decades, paleohistological analyses have only started to uncover the details of its function. Yet, there has been an overall bias toward sampling ankylosaurian remains from the Northern Hemisphere and limited quantitative studies on the morphological and functional evolution. Here, we describe new ankylosaurian materials recovered from the Late Cretaceous of Antarctica that, in combination with data compiled from the...

Allometric scaling describes the relationship of trait size to body size within and among taxa. The slope of the population-level regression of trait size against body size (i.e., static allometry) is typically invariant among closely related populations and species. Such invariance is commonly interpreted to reflect a combination of developmental and selective constraints that delimit a phenotypic space into which evolution could proceed most easily. Thus, understanding how allometric relationships do eventually evolve is important...

The avian family Timaliidae is a species rich and morphologically diverse component of African and Asian tropical forests. The morphological diversity within the family has attracted interest from ecologists and evolutionary biologists, but systematists have long suspected that this diversity might also mislead taxonomy, and recent molecular phylogenetic work has supported this hypothesis. We produced and analyzed a dataset of six genes and almost 300 individuals to assess the evolutionary history of the family. Although...

Inferring the genetic architecture of evolution in the fossil record is difficult because genetic crosses are impossible, the acquisition of DNA is usually impossible, and phenotype-genotype maps are rarely obvious. However, such inference is valuable because it reveals the genetic basis of microevolutionary change across many more generations than is possible in studies of extant taxa, thereby integrating microevolutionary process and macroevolutionary pattern. Here, we infer the genetic basis of pelvic skeleton reduction in Gasterosteus...

Objective: We aimed to determine the association between ruptured saccular aneurysms and aspirin use/aspirin dose. Methods: 4,701 patients who were diagnosed at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital between 1990 and 2016 with 6,411 unruptured and ruptured saccular intracranial aneurysms were evaluated. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed to determine the association between aSAH and aspirin use, including aspirin dose. Inverse probability weighting using propensity scores was used to adjust...

Objective: Trauma quality improvement programs and registries improve care and outcomes for injured patients. Designated trauma centers calculate injury scores using dedicated trauma registrars; however, many injuries arrive at non-trauma centers, leaving a substantial amount of data uncaptured. We propose automated methods to identify severe chest injury using machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) methods from the electronic health record (EHR) for quality reporting. Materials and Methods: A level I trauma center was...

In this work, the asymmetric weld fusion geometry in oscillating laser beam welding (OLBW) of aluminium alloy was reported and investigated using a numerical approach. A multi-physics heat transfer and fluid flow model of OLBW was developed and validated with the corresponding experimental results. The weld fusion geometry, temperature fields, and fluid flow behaviours for four commonly used oscillation modes, line, circle, eight, and infinity, were calculated to analyse the origin of the asymmetric weld...

Additional file 6: Fig S6. Standard Plot for ALA measurement. x: the absorbance at 554 nm; y: ALA concentration of sample after diluted (mg/L).

Symbiosis often occurs between partners with distinct life history characteristics and dispersal mechanisms. Many bacterial symbionts have genomes comprised of multiple replicons with distinct rates of evolution and horizontal transmission. Such differences might drive differences in population structure between hosts and symbionts and among the elements of the divided genomes of bacterial symbionts. These differences might, in turn, shape the evolution of symbiotic interactions and bacterial evolution. Here we use whole-genome resequencing of a hierarchically-structured...

We conducted a reciprocal greenhouse experiment to examine how the growth of prairie grass species depended on the soil communities conditioned by conspecific or heterospecific plant species in the field. The source soil came from monocultures in a long-term competition experiment (LTCE, Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, MN, USA). Within the LTCE, six species of perennial prairie grasses were grown in monocultures or in eight pairwise competition plots for 12 years under conditions of low...

Additional file 1.

Additional file 1.

Additional file 6: Fig S6. Standard Plot for ALA measurement. x: the absorbance at 554 nm; y: ALA concentration of sample after diluted (mg/L).

Since the New Synthesis, most migration-selection balance theory predicted that there should be negligible differentiation over small spatial scales (relative to dispersal), because gene flow should erode any effect of divergent selection. Nevertheless, there are classic examples of microgeographic divergence, which theory suggests can arise under specific conditions: exceptionally strong selection, phenotypic plasticity in philopatric individuals, or non-random dispersal. Here, we present evidence of microgeographic morphological variation within lake and stream populations of threespine stickleback...

The mechanisms that determine patterns of species dispersal are important factors in the production and maintenance of biodiversity. Understanding these mechanisms helps to forecast the responses of species to environmental change. Here we used a comparative framework and genome-wide data obtained through RAD-seq to compare the patterns of connectivity among breeding colonies for five penguin species with shared ancestry, overlapping distributions, and differing ecological niches, allowing an examination of the intrinsic and extrinsic barriers governing...

Two datasets are provided to support the journal article (https://doi.org/10.1643/i2020112) by T. C. Grande and M. V. H. Wilson naming the new Bermuda fish species Polymixia hollisterae. The first dataset is for 2-D multivariate morphometric comparisons of selected specimens and species of the fish genus Polymixia. The file is in TPS format, as a plain text file, for use in the application MorphoJ. The data are for 27 specimens with pixel coordinates for 34 landmarks...

A goal of modern biology is to develop the genotype-phenotype (G→P) map, a predictive understanding of how genomic information generates trait variation that forms the basis of both natural and managed communities. As microbiome research advances, however, it has become clear that many of these traits are symbiotic extended phenotypes, being governed by genetic variation encoded not only by the host’s own genome, but also by the genomes of myriad cryptic symbionts. Building a reliable...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) can target cardiomyocytes (CMs) to directly invade the heart resulting in high mortality. This study aims to explore the biological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 infected myocardium based on omics by collecting transcriptome data and analyzing them with a series of bioinformatics tools. Totally, 86 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were discovered in SARS-CoV-2 infected CMs, and 15 miRNAs were discovered to target 60 genes. Functional enrichment analysis indicated that these...