There are many different ways to do the philosophy of biology. At one end of a spectrum of possibilities would be works of general philosophical interest drawing on biological examples for illustration and support. At the other end would be works that deal only with conceptual and methodological issues that arise within the practice of biology. The strategy of this book is closer to the second …
The Gene Ontology (GO) is the leading project to organize biological knowledge on genes and their products in a formal and consistent way across genomic resources. This has had a profound impact at several levels. First, such standardization has made possible the integration of multiple resources and sources of knowledge, thereby increasing their discoverability and simplifying their usage.…
Abstract We estimate changes in forest cover (deforestation and forest regrowth) in the tropics for the two last decades (1990–2000 and 2000–2010) based on a sample of 4000 units of 10 910 km size. Forest cover is interpreted from satellite imagery at 30 9 30 m resolution. Forest cover changes are then combined with pan-tropical biomass maps to estimate carbon losses. We show that there wa…
Republik Indonesia merupakan negara kepuiauan dan terletak di daerah tropis. Dengan kondisi geografis demikian, Indonesia memiliki berbagai potensi sumberdaya alam. Sebagian dari sumberdaya alam itu telah sejak lama dimanfaatkan masyarakat dalam berbagai bidang. Namun sebagian besar masih belum tergali secara optimal. Satu diantara sumberdaya alam yang potensial untuk dikembangkan adalah mi…
Kampus Dumai merupakan satu diantara kampus yang dimiliki Universitas Riau. Kampus ini dikembangkan untuk kegiatan belajar mengajar bagi Jurusan Ilmu Kelautan Fakultas Perikanan dan Ilmu Kelautan Universitas Riau. Untuk memfasilitasi itu maka di kampus ini telah dibangun berbagai sarana dan prasarana belajar seperti ruang kuliah, laboratorium, asrama mahasiswa, perumahan, kolam dan tambak perc…
SUMMARY 1. Relationships between river flow characteristics and fish community/population dynamics (i.e. flow–ecology relationships) underpin methods to determine and monitor environmental water allocations. Quantifying these relationships can be difficult, and consequently, most environmental flow strategies for fish conservation in Australian rivers are based on general flow–ecology rela…
SUMMARY 1. Groundwater ecosystems offer vast and complex habitats for diverse microbial communities. Here we review the current status of groundwater microbial biodiversity research with a focus on Bacteria and Archaea and on the prospects of modern techniques for enhancing our understanding of microbial biodiversity patterns and their relation to environmental conditions. 2. The enormous vol…
SUMMARY: 1. In Mediterranean and other water-stressed climates, water management is critical to the conservation of freshwater ecosystems. To secure and maintain water allocations for the environment, integrated water management approaches are needed that consider ecosystem flow requirements, patterns of human water demands and the temporal and spatial dynamics of water availability. 2. Human…
Abstract: Cell walls are vital to the normal growth and development of plants as they protect the protoplast and provide rigidity to the stem. Here, two poplar and Arabidopsis orthologous endoglucanases, which have been proposed to play a role in secondary cell wall development, were examined. The class B endoglucanases, PtGH9B5 and AtGH9B5, are secreted enzymes that have a predicted glycosylp…
SUMMARY 1. This paper is an introduction to and overview of a special issue on groundwater ecology with a focus on biodiversity assessment and conservation. The subterranean environment harbours unique biological communities of remarkable diversity, comprisingboth microorganisms and micro-, meio- and macrofauna. This biodiversity of ground waters remains poorly known compared to that of freshw…
SUMMARY: 1. This paper is a synthesis of a special issue on groundwater biodiversity with a focus on obligate subterranean species, the stygobionts. The series of papers constitutes a great leap forward in assessing and understanding biodiversity patterns because of the use of large quantitative data sets obtained over a broad geographic scale. They also represent a conceptual shift, away fro…
Mutants defective in chloroplast development or photosynthesis are liable to accumulate higher levels of anthocyanin in photo‐oxidative stress. However, regulatory mechanisms of anthocyanin biosynthesis in the mutants remain unclear. Here, we investigated the mechanism by which the deletion of thylakoid formation1 (THF1) leads to an increased level of anthocyanin in Arabidopsis thaliana L. Ph…
SUMMARY: 1. With few exceptions, copepods dominate over other crustacean and non-crustacean invertebrate groups in ground water. They have colonised a vast array of habitats in continental ground waters, where they are represented by over 1000 species in six orders: Platycopioida, Misophrioida, Calanoida, Cyclopoida, Harpacticoida, Gelyelloida. However, members of only the last four orders ent…
Abstract: Transglycanases (endotransglycosylases) cleave a polysaccharide (donor-substrate) in mid-chain, and then transfer a portion onto another poly- or oligosaccharide (acceptor-substrate). Such enzymes contribute to plant cellwall assembly and/or re-structuring. We sought a general method for revealing novel homo- and hetero-transglycanases, applicable to diverse polysaccharides and oligos…
SUMMARY 1. Streams are highly connected to their landscapes and so are easily altered by multiple stressors that affect both uplands and riparian zones, and the streams themselves. These include dams and diversions, channelisation, deforestation, water pollution, biological invasions and climate change. 2. We review research conducted in Hokkaido Island, northern Japan, which measured the eff…
Abstract In cereals, the presence of soluble polysaccharides including (1,3;1,4)-b-glucan has downstream implications for human health, animal feed and biofuel applications. Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench is a versatile crop, but there are limited reports regarding the content of such soluble polysaccharides. Here, the amount of (1,3;1,4)-b-glucan present in sorghum tissues was measured using a Me…
It was on a placid canoe trip at a Gordon Conference in 2002 that Lee Segel told me that he was writing a new book in mathematical biology. In the prime of his health and at the peak of his mathematical career, Lee asked me to agree to act as shepherd to this book “in case” anything happened to prevent his completion of the project. The request was purely “academic” at that time, an…
Stochastic, meta-heuristic and linear construction algorithms for the design of DNA strands satisfying Hamming distance and reverse-complement constraints often use a GC-content constraint to pre-process the DNA strands. Since GC-content is a poor predictor of DNA strand hybridization strength the strands can be filtered by post-processing using thermodynamic calculations. An alternative approa…
Microarray technology allows for the collection of multiple replicates of gene expression time course data for hundreds of genes at a handful of time points. Developing hypotheses about a gene transcriptional network, based on time course gene expression data is an important and very challenging problem. In many situations there are similarities which suggest a hierarchical structure between t…
Information theory has been used for quite some time in the area of computational biology. In this paper we present a pattern discovery method, named Fast Entropic Profiler, that is based on a local entropy function that captures the importance of a region with respect to the whole genome. The local entropy function has been introduced by Vinga and Almeida in [29], here we discuss and improve t…
In the tree reconciliation approach to infer the duplication history of a gene family, the gene (family) tree is compared to the corresponding species tree. Incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) gives rise to stochastic variation in the topology of a gene tree and hence likely introduces false duplication events when a tree reconciliation method is used. We quantify the effect of ILS on gene duplica…
We review methods for capturing differential coexpression, which can be divided into two cases by the size of gene sets: 1) two paired genes and 2) multiple genes. In the first case, two genes are positively and negatively correlated with each other under one and the other conditions, respectively. In the second case, multiple genes are coexpressed and randomly expressed under one and the other…
Marine biogeochemistry is a broad, interdisciplinary subject overlapping a range of other disciplines such as marine chemistry, geochemistry, ecology, physiology and oceanography, but in its own right it has become pivotal to progress in marine research in recent years. As a key component of the ‘earth system’, marine biogeochemistry interfaces directly with terrestrial, atmospheric and…
In a relatively brief period the soybean has become a major crop plant in the United States. Based on the utilization of the bean, or products therefrom, a substantial soybean industry has also developed. Its uses, agricultural and industrial, primarily depend on the high content of both protein (ca. 40%) and oil (ca. 20%) in the bean. Soybeans are a cash crop and provide a significant par…
Next generation sequencing (NGS) has surpassed the traditional Sanger sequencing method to become the main choice for large-scale, genome-wide sequencing studies with ultra-high-throughput production and a huge reduction in costs. The NGS technologies have had enormous impact on the studies of structural and functional genomics in all the life sciences. In this book, Next Generation Sequencing …
We studied in detail the mean microfibril angle and the width of cellulose crystals from the pith to the bark of a 15-year-old Maidenhair tree (Ginkgo biloba L.). The orientation of cellulose microfibrils with respect to the cell axis and the width and length of cellulose crystallites were determined using Xray diffraction. Raman microscopy was used to compare the lignin distribution in the cel…
The nitrogen fixation by strains belonging to the Bacillus genus remains poorly explored. In this work, the diversity of endospore-forming bacilli isolated from the rhizosphere of sunflower was evaluated. A total of 101 strains were identified based on the V1-V2 variable regions of the 16S rRNA gene. Strains belonging to the genera Bacillus and Paenibacillus represented 41.6% and 58.4%, re…
The Asian rice gall midge (Orseolia oryzae Wood‐Mason) is a serious pest of rice that causes huge loss in yield. While feeding inside the susceptible host, maggots secrete substances that facilitate the formation of a hollow tube‐like structure called gall and prevent panicle formation. The present investigation was carried out to get an account of biochemical changes occurring in the rice …
Potassium (K+) is an essential macronutrient in plants and a lack of K+ significantly reduces the potential for plant growth and development. By contrast, sodium (Na+), while beneficial to some extent, at high concentrations it disturbs and inhibits various physiological processes and plant growth. Due to their chemical similarities, some functions of K+ can be undertaken by Na+ but K+ homeost…
Single and low copy nuclear genes offer a larger number of, and more rapidly evolving, characters than the chloroplast and nuclear ribosomal gene sequences that have dominated plant phylogenetic studies to date. Until recently, only one or a few low copy nuclear gene markers were included in such studies. Now, the rapid adoption of “next generation sequencing” (NGS) techniques offers sim…
The leaf-opposed tendril, a characteristic organ in Vitaceae (grape family), is likely a morphological key innovation for the family. It has been considered as the homologous organ of the inflorescence. Expression of floral related genes has been studied extensively in the model species, grapevine (Vitis vinifera), to uncover molecular mechanisms that determine the development of a common un…
Hystrix Moench was a perennial genus of the Triticeae. Its members differed from those of other genera in the tribe in lacking glumes. The type species is H. patula Moench, a North American taxon. When it became accepted that H. patula should be included in Elymus, Hystrix could not be used as a generic name. The problem became how to treat the other species that had been included in Hystrix…
In plants with infrequent pollinator services, the benefits of reproductive assurance could be eroded by severe ovule discounting and inbreeding depression (ID). However, it remains unclear how selfing evolves under complete pollinator failure and strong ID. We examined the mating system and ID under netting and robbing conditions in Comastoma pulmonarium (Turcz.) Toyok. (Gentianaceae), an a…
Museum collections are essential for understanding biodiversity and next-generation sequencing methods (NGS) offer new opportunities to generate genomic data on specimens of extinct species for phylogenetic and other studies. Hesperelaea is a monotypic Oleaceae genus that was collected only once, 140 years ago on Guadalupe Island, Mexico. This lineage is almost certainly extinct, and has bee…
The present study analyzes the fatty acid (FA) profile of lipids isolated from Varroa destructor Anderson & Trueman, a parasitic mite of the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.), uninfected and infected worker prepupae of the Carnolian subspecies Apis mellifera carnica Pollmann, and bee bread fed to the worker brood. Significant differences are observed in the FA profiles of lipids isolated from paras…
Pathogens target phytohormone signalling pathways to promote disease. Plants deploy salicylic acid (SA)-mediated defences against biotrophs. Pathogens antagonize SA immunity by activating jasmonate signalling, for example Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 produces coronatine (COR), a jasmonic acid (JA) mimic. This study found unexpected dynamics between SA, JA and COR and co-operation be…
Climate oscillations and landscape heterogeneity make the historical population processes of organisms of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau quite complex. We used chloroplast DNA sequences and amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLPs) to study the phylogeography and genetic variation of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau endemic Spenceria ramalana Trimen. The parsimony network contains two star‐li…
The rhythmic opening/closing and volatile emissions of flowers are known to attract pollinators at specific times. That these rhythms are maintained under constant light or dark conditions suggests a circadian clock involvement. Although a forward and reverse genetic approach has led to the identification of core circadian clock components in Arabidopsis thaliana, the involvement of these clo…
1. The issue of how to estimate species abundance from presence/absence maps has attracted much attention. Several methods have been developed to address this problem. However, those methods either overlook the structure of spatial autocorrelation of species distribution, thus leading to underestimation, or they demand extra information besides presence/absencemaps. 2. This study first deve…
Rubia L. is the type genus of the coffee family Rubiaceae and the third largest genus in the tribe Rubieae, comprising ca. 80 species restricted to the Old World. China is an important diversity center for Rubia, where approximately half of its species occur. However, its internal phylogenetic relationships are still poorly understood. The objective of the present study is to contribute to t…
A close relationship between Androsace and related genera (Douglasia, Vitaliana, and Pomatosace) has long been recognized. Recent molecular studies have provided abundant evidence that Douglasia, Vitaliana, and Pomatosace are nested within Androsace and together constitute the monophyletic “Androsace group”. We investigated the pollen morphology of 80 taxa representing all sections of An…
There have been few studies of the alpine subnival belt flora in the Hengduan Mountains (HM), which host remarkable biodiversity. To extend knowledge of this flora, we examined published florae, herbarium specimens, and field observations (and material) collected by both ourselves and others. In total, 942 seed plant species have been recorded in the belt, representing 168 genera and 48 fami…
1. EnvironmentalDNA(eDNA) is increasingly used for surveillance and detection of species of interest in aquatic and soil samples. 2. A significant risk associated with eDNAmethods is potential false-positive results due to laboratory contamination. 3. To minimize and quantify this risk, we designed and validated a set of synthetic oligonucleotides for use as species-specific positive PCR co…
Objectives: We report cross-sectional, objectively measured physical activity data for 399 children and adolescents aged 6 to 18 years. We evaluated physical activity of children and adolescents, considered time spent in each activity intensity category, and explored the impact of growth disruption (stunting and wasting) on physical activity patterns. Methods: Participants wore an Actical (M…
1. Estimates of mortality are fundamental to studies of population ecology and assessments of conservation status. Mortality is frequently estimated using individual identifications by means of mark–recapture methods. These estimates become biased with heterogeneity in identification and especially if patterns of heterogeneity change with time. 2. If animals are social, then survival may …
Mitochondrial markers have been among the most utilized loci for phylogenetic inference, especially for understudied invertebrate groups for which we yet lack genomic resources. Mitochondrial genes generally evolve faster than nuclear genes and have smaller effective population sizes (Funk & Omland 2003), which has contributed to their popularity in species-level studies. Although the evolut…
Transitions between animal and wind pollination have occurred in many lineages and have been linked to various floral modifications,but these have seldom been assessed in a phylogenetic framework. In the dioecious genus Leucadendron (Proteaceae),transitions from insect to wind pollination have occurred at least four times. Using analyses that controlled for relatedness among Leucadendron specie…
Inbreeding depression, the reduced fitness of offspring of related individuals, is a central theme in evolutionary biology. Inbreeding effects are influenced by the genetic makeup of a population, which is driven by any history of genetic bottlenecks and genetic drift. The Chatham Island black robin represents a case of extreme inbreeding following two severe population bottlenecks. We tested …
1. The surface layer of soil as transition zone between pedosphere and atmosphere plays a crucial role in exchange processes of nutrients, atmospheric gases and water. Knowledge of its water content is essential, as it governs both physiological and transport mechanisms. In arid and semi-arid regions, this uppermost soil layer is commonly colonized by biological soil crusts (biocrusts), whic…
The purpose of this study was to obtain basic information on acclimation capacity of photosynthesis in Siebold’s beech seedlings to increasing light intensity under future elevated CO2 conditions. We monitored leaf photosynthetic traits of these seedlings in changing light conditions (before removal of shade trees, the year after removal of shade trees and after acclimation to open condition…