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Monthly Archives: November 2011
Metabolic evolution of energy-conserving pathways for succinate production in Escherichia coli
This biochemistry paper was definitely a grueling one, but I am glad we worked our way through it and brought up some interesting questions. One of the questions that was brought up was, how do we gauge the level of … Continue reading
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Breakdown of the brown trout evolutionary history due to hybridization between native and cultivated fish
As previously discussed, fishing tends to exploit certain size and age classes in populations, leaving managers with the problem of maintaining healthy populations. Last week we discussed how somatic growth rate and population levels of harvest will evolve in directions … Continue reading
Life-History Evolution When Lestes Damselflies Invaded Vernal Ponds
While copious research has been conducted on the evolution of morphological characters, the macroevolution of life-history traits along environmental gradients is a relatively unknown field of study. Life-History Theory posits that the timing and duration of important events in an … Continue reading
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Tagged Damselflies, Ecology, Environmental Gradient, Life Histories, Odonata
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Sustaining Fisheries Yields Over Evolutionary Time Scales
Fisheries want to exploit the largest fish, usually enforcing minimum size limits, which creates a truncated size and age distributing that lack larger and older fish. This form of management tends to ignore the potential for evolutionary change in harvestable … Continue reading
Plasmodium falciparum var gene expression is modified by host immunity
In “Plasmodium falciparum var gene expression is modified by host immunity,” the authors examined one of the things that help the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum be so effective in causing disease. P. falciparum has a protein called PfEMP1 that it … Continue reading
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Antagonistic coevolution between a bacterium and a bacteriophage
The paper Antagonistic coevolution between a bacterium and a bacteriophage provided a unique insight in exploring how each one response to the other. As stated in the paper this was the first, to the researchers’ knowledge, of demonstrating a long-term … Continue reading
Posted in Coevolution
Tagged bacteria, bacteriophage, Co-evolution, directional selection, fluctuating selection
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Effects of zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) on native bivalves: the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?
Zebra mussels have coexisted in their native European range alongside sphaeriids and other unionids on a timescale ranging from decades to millennia. They were accidentally introduced to North American in the late 1980’s and have become well known for out … Continue reading
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Tagged Biodiversity, Ecology, Evolution, extinction, invasive species
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Algae acquire vitamin B12 through a symbiotic relationship with bacteria
Individually, algae and bacteria make interesting organisms to study. Bacteria are organisms that can be found living in a range of different environments. Besides being organisms capable of causing disease in humans, they are also vital to the cycling of … Continue reading
Discordant molecular and morphological evolution in buffalofishes
This study examined the evolution of the five Ictiobus buffalofish species via both morphological and phylogenetic avenues, and attempted to align the differences in morphology with the differences found in the genetic sequence of the mitochindrial Cytochrome B gene and … Continue reading
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Tagged buffalofish, Evolution, hybridization, Ictiobus, introgression, morphology, phylogenetics
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“Rapid evolution of sessility in an endemic species flock of the freshwater bivalve Corbicula from ancient lakes on Sulawesi, Indonesia”
In this study, researchers looked at the bivalve family Corbiculidae of which seven described species are endemic to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Those seven species were considered to fall into two genera: Corbicula and Posostrea. Only one species … Continue reading