Search results for "Asian"

Factors affecting population dynamics of Eurasian woodcocks wintering in France: assessing the efficiency of a hunting-free reserve

2005

International audience; The Eurasian woodcock Scolopax rusticola is a migratory bird of major importance for hunting, which is susceptible to habitat loss and the stochastic effects of severe winter weather. Conservation issues mostly concerned regulation of hunting, but the efficiency of hunting-free reserves has never been investigated. We studied causes of mortality and survival probabilities of 98 radio-tagged woodcocks in a reserve with no hunting and in an adjoining hunting area in Brittany (France). Predation, mostly by mammalian predators on fields at night, was similar among adults and yearlings, while hunting mortality was more important in yearlings. Overall winter survival proba…

Lake eutrophication and brownification downgrade availability and transfer of essential fatty acids for human consumption

2016

Article

The Eurasian Modern Pollen Database (EMPD), version 2

2020

The Eurasian (née European) Modern Pollen Database (EMPD) was established in 2013 to provide a public database of high-quality modern pollen surface samples to help support studies of past climate, land cover, and land use using fossil pollen. The EMPD is part of, and complementary to, the European Pollen Database (EPD) which contains data on fossil pollen found in Late Quaternary sedimentary archives throughout the Eurasian region. The EPD is in turn part of the rapidly growing Neotoma database, which is now the primary home for global palaeoecological data. This paper describes version 2 of the EMPD in which the number of samples held in the database has been increased by 60% from 4826 to…

2020

The Mediterranean Basin represents a Global Biodiversity Hotspot where many organisms show high inter- and intraspecific differentiation. Extant phylogeographic patterns of terrestrial circum-Mediterranean faunas were mainly shaped through Pleistocene range shifts and range fragmentations due to retreat into different glacial refugia. Thus, several extant Mediterranean bird species have diversified by surviving glaciations in different hospitable refugia and subsequently expanded their distribution ranges during the Holocene. Such a scenario was also suggested for the Eurasian Wren (Nannus troglodytes) despite the lack of genetic data for most Mediterranean subspecies. Our phylogenetic mult…

Towards understanding isotope variability in elephant ivory to establish isotopic profiling and source-area determination

2016

Abstract We present here new isotopic data (δ 13 C, δ 15 N, δ 18 O, δ 2 H, and δ 34 S) from pulverised ivory powder, measured by continuous flow isotope ratio mass spectrometry from an unprecedented large dataset of 507 ivory samples, derived from twenty-eight African and six Asian elephant range states. The aim of this study is to assess the accuracy of isotopic fingerprinting and to evaluate its forensic potential and limitations to predict the provenance of ivory of unknown origin. We constructed a nominal assignment framework for the African reference samples, consisting of 208 different sites and applied the weighted k -Nearest Neighbor Classifier with reference site as classifier and …

Late Cretaceous-Early Eocene origin of yams (Dioscorea, Dioscoreaceae) in the Laurasian Palaearctic and their subsequent Oligocene-Miocene diversific…

2015

Aim: Dioscorea (Dioscoreaceae) is a predominantly pantropical genus (< 600 species) that includes the third most important tropical tuber crop and species of pharmacological value. Fossil records from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres were used to test hypotheses about the origin of the genus Dioscorea, and to examine potential macroevolutionary processes that led to its current distribution. Location: Pantropical distribution. Methods: Divergence times were estimated using the most comprehensive phylogeny of the group published to date based on plastid sequences and fossil calibrations, applying a relaxed-clock model approach. Ancestral areas and range shifts were reconstructed us…

Genome-wide association meta-analysis highlights light-induced signaling as a driver for refractive error

2018

Skin affections after sulfur mustard (SM) exposure include erythema, blister formation and severe inflammation. An antidote or specific therapy does not exist. Anti-inflammatory compounds as well as substances counteracting SM-induced cell death are under investigation. In this study, we investigated the benzylisoquinoline alkaloide berberine (BER), a metabolite in plants like berberis vulgaris, which is used as herbal pharmaceutical in Asian countries, against SM toxicity using a well-established in vitro approach. Keratinocyte (HaCaT) mono-cultures (MoC) or HaCaT/THP-1 co-cultures (CoC) were challenged with 100, 200 or 300 mM SM for 1 h. Post-exposure, both MoC and CoC were treated with 1…

Neolithic animal domestication as seen from ancient DNA

2018

Abstract In recent years, archaeological, archaeozoological and population genetic studies have increasingly converged on a southwest Asian origin for the four Neolithic farm animals: cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. The power of ancient DNA studies lies in the possibility of tracking the genetic traces of major demographic processes, such as domestication itself and subsequent migration, at their spatiotemporal sources. In doing so, they are bypassing more recent events, which may have blurred ancient signals until the point of disappearance. Past ancient DNA studies have mostly relied on a single, powerful and – even for degraded ancient samples – easily accessible genetic marker: the mate…

Impact of PNPLA3 and IFNL3 polymorphisms on hepatic steatosis in Asian patients with chronic hepatitis C.

2017

Background and aims A recent meta-analysis revealed that the genotype PNPLA3 rs738409 GG is associated with a higher risk of hepatic steatosis (HS) in Caucasian patients with chronic hepatitis C (CHC). However, controversial results were found regarding Asian populations. Furthermore, previous studies have shown a negative association between interferon lambda 3 (IFNL3) rs12979860 CC and HS in Caucasian CHC patients, but there have been no reports indicating any such association in Asian populations. In this study, then, we investigated the association of PNPLA3 and IFNL3 polymorphisms with HS in Asian CHC patients. Methods We enrolled consecutive CHC patients who underwent liver biopsy pri…

A genome-wide association study of corneal astigmatism: The CREAM Consortium

2018

Contains fulltext : 191261.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Purpose: To identify genes and genetic markers associated with corneal astigmatism. Methods: A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of corneal astigmatism undertaken for 14 European ancestry (n=22,250) and 8 Asian ancestry (n=9,120) cohorts was performed by the Consortium for Refractive Error and Myopia. Cases were defined as having >0.75 diopters of corneal astigmatism. Subsequent gene-based and gene-set analyses of the meta-analyzed results of European ancestry cohorts were performed using VEGAS2 and MAGMA software. Additionally, estimates of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based heritability for …