Search results for "CIP"
showing 10 items of 15068 documents
Transcriptomic responses to environmental change in fishes: Insights from RNA sequencing
2017
The need to better understand how plasticity and evolution affect organismal responses to environmental variability is paramount in the face of global climate change. The potential for using RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to study complex responses by non-model organisms to the environment is evident in a rapidly growing body of literature. This is particularly true of fishes for which research has been motivated by their ecological importance, socioeconomic value, and increased use as model species for medical and genetic research. Here, we review studies that have used RNA-seq to study transcriptomic responses to continuous abiotic variables to which fishes have likely evolved a response and th…
Identification of Stress Associated microRNAs in Solanum lycopersicum by High-Throughput Sequencing
2019
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is one of the most important crops around the world and also a model plant to study response to stress. High-throughput sequencing was used to analyse the microRNA (miRNA) profile of tomato plants undergoing five biotic and abiotic stress conditions (drought, heat, P. syringae infection, B. cinerea infection, and herbivore insect attack with Leptinotarsa decemlineata larvae) and one chemical treatment with a plant defence inducer, hexanoic acid. We identified 104 conserved miRNAs belonging to 37 families and we predicted 61 novel tomato miRNAs. Among those 165 miRNAs, 41 were stress-responsive. Reverse transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) was used to valida…
Gene expression in diapausing rotifer eggs in response to divergent environmental predictability regimes
2020
AbstractIn unpredictable environments in which reliable cues for predicting environmental variation are lacking, a diversifying bet-hedging strategy for diapause exit is expected to evolve, whereby only a portion of diapausing forms will resume development at the first occurrence of suitable conditions. This study focused on diapause termination in the rotifer Brachionus plicatilis s.s., addressing the transcriptional profile of diapausing eggs from environments differing in the level of predictability and the relationship of such profiles with hatching patterns. RNA-Seq analyses revealed significant differences in gene expression between diapausing eggs produced in the laboratory under com…
A self-inducible heterologous protein expression system in Escherichia coli
2016
AbstractEscherichia coli is an important experimental, medical and industrial cell factory for recombinant protein production. The inducible lac promoter is one of the most commonly used promoters for heterologous protein expression in E. coli. Isopropyl-β-D-thiogalactoside (IPTG) is currently the most efficient molecular inducer for regulating this promoter’s transcriptional activity. However, limitations have been observed in large-scale and microplate production, including toxicity, cost and culture monitoring. Here, we report the novel SILEX (Self-InducibLe Expression) system, which is a convenient, cost-effective alternative that does not require cell density monitoring or IPTG inducti…
On the thermodynamic origin of metabolic scaling
2018
The origin and shape of metabolic scaling has been controversial since Kleiber found that basal metabolic rate of animals seemed to vary as a power law of their body mass with exponent 3/4, instead of 2/3, as a surface-to-volume argument predicts. The universality of exponent 3/4 -claimed in terms of the fractal properties of the nutrient network- has recently been challenged according to empirical evidence that observed a wealth of robust exponents deviating from 3/4. Here we present a conceptually simple thermodynamic framework, where the dependence of metabolic rate with body mass emerges from a trade-off between the energy dissipated as heat and the energy efficiently used by the organi…
Ancient DNA reveals the Arctic origin of Viking Age cod from Haithabu, Germany
2017
Knowledge of the range and chronology of historic trade and long-distance transport of natural resources is essential for determining the impacts of past human activities on marine environments. However, the specific biological sources of imported fauna are often difficult to identify, in particular if species have a wide spatial distribution and lack clear osteological or isotopic differentiation between populations. Here, we report that ancient fish-bone remains, despite being porous, brittle, and light, provide an excellent source of endogenous DNA (15-46%) of sufficient quality for whole-genome reconstruction. By comparing ancient sequence data to that of modern specimens, we determine …
Opposite trends in the genus Monsonia (Geraniaceae): Specialization in the African deserts and range expansions throughout eastern Africa
2017
The African Austroerate Flora stands out by its important species richness. A distinctive element of this flora is Monsonia (Geraniaceae), mostly found in the Namib-Karoo but also in the Natal-Drakensberg, the Somalian Zambezian and the Saharo-Arabian regions. Here, we reconstruct the evolution and biogeographic history of Monsonia based on nuclear and plastid markers, and examine the role of morphological and niche evolution in its diversification using species distribution modeling and macroevolutionary models. Our results indicate that Monsonia first diversified in the Early Miocene c.21 Ma, coinciding with the start of desertification in southwestern Africa. An important diversification…
Application of high resolution melting assay (HRM) to study temperature-dependent intraspecific competition in a pathogenic bacterium
2017
AbstractStudies on species’ responses to climate change have focused largely on the direct effect of abiotic factors and in particular temperature, neglecting the effects of biotic interactions in determining the outcome of climate change projections. Many microbes rely on strong interference competition; hence the fitness of many pathogenic bacteria could be a function of both their growth properties and intraspecific competition. However, due to technical challenges in distinguishing and tracking individual strains, experimental evidence on intraspecific competition has been limited so far. Here, we developed a robust application of the high-resolution melting (HRM) assay to study head-to…
Repeated evolution of camouflage in speciose desert rodents
2017
AbstractThere are two main factors explaining variation among species and the evolution of characters along phylogeny: adaptive change, including phenotypic and genetic responses to selective pressures, and phylogenetic inertia, or the resemblance between species due to shared phylogenetic history. Phenotype-habitat colour match, a classic Darwinian example of the evolution of camouflage (crypsis), offers the opportunity to test the importance of historical versus ecological mechanisms in shaping phenotypes among phylogenetically closely related taxa. To assess it, we investigated fur (phenotypic data) and habitat (remote sensing data) colourations, along with phylogenetic information, in t…
Isolating, characterising and identifying a Cry1Ac resistance mutation in field populations of Helicoverpa punctigera
2018
AbstractTransgenic cotton expressing insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) has been grown in Australia for over 20 years and resistance remains the biggest threat. The native moth, Helicoverpa punctigera is a significant pest of cotton. A genotype causing resistance to Cry1Ac in H. punctigera was isolated from the field and a homozygous line established. The phenotype is recessive and homozygous individuals possess 113 fold resistance to Cry1Ac. Individuals that carry Cry1Ac resistance genes are rare in Australia with a frequency of 0.033 being detected in field populations. RNAseq, RT-PCR and DNA sequencing reveals a single nucleotide polymorphism at a splice site in the c…