Elevations in glucocorticoid levels (GCs) in breeding females (often called maternal stress) may induce adaptive shifts in offspring life histories. Offspring produced by mothers with elevated GCs may be better prepared to face harsh environments where a faster pace of life is beneficial. We examined how experimentally elevated GCs in pregnant or lactating North American red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) affected offspring growth in body mass, structural (skeletal) size, oxidative stress levels...
Maintaining sexual reproduction in a highly competitive world is still one of the major mysteries of biology given the apparently high efficiency of asexual reproduction. Co-evolutionary theories such as the Red Queen hypothesis would suggest that the microbiomes in human reproductive systems, specifically the microbiomes contained in semen and vaginal fluids, should reach some level of homogeneity thanks to arguably the most conspicuous microbiome transmission between two sexes. The long-term sexual...
Bacterial symbionts that manipulate the reproduction of their hosts to increase their successful transmission are important factors in invertebrate ecology and evolution. In light of their use as a biological control agent, studying the genomic and phenotypic diversity of reproductive manipulators can improve efforts to control infectious diseases and contribute to our understanding of host-symbiont evolution. Despite the vast genomic and phenotypic diversity of reproductive manipulators, only a...
The dynamical interaction between a growing cancer population and the adaptive immune system generates diverse evolutionary trajectories which ultimately result in tumor clearance or immune escape. Here, we create a simple mathematical model coupling T-cell recognition with an evolving cancer population which may randomly produce evasive subclones, imparting transient protection against the effector T-cells. We demonstrate that T-cell turnover declines and evasion rates together explain differential...
Many biotic and abiotic factors that influence the distribution, abundance, and diversification of species can simultaneously affect multiple evolutionary lineages within or across communities. These include environmental changes and inter-specific ecological interactions that cause ranges of multiple, co-distributed species to contract, expand, or become fragmented. Such processes predict temporally clustered patterns of evolutionary events across species, such as synchronous population divergences...
Modelling genetic diversity needs an underlying genealogy model. To choose a fitting model based on genetic data, one can perform model selection between classes of genealogical trees, e.g. Kingman's coalescent with exponential growth or multiple merger coalescents. Such selection can be based on many different statistics measuring genetic diversity. We use a random forest based Approximate Bayesian Computation to disentangle the effects of different statistics on distinguishing between various classes...
Pathogens should evolve to avirulence. However, while baculoviruses can be transmitted through direct contact, their main route of infection goes through the death and liquefaction of their caterpillar hosts and highly virulent strains still seem to be advantaged through infection cycles. Furthermore, one of them, Autographa californica multiple nucleopolyhedrovirus, is so generalist that it can infect more than 100 different hosts. To understand and characterize the evolutionary potential of...
AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWSexually transmitted infections (STIs) are predicted to play an important role in the evolution of host mating strategies, and vice versa, yet our understanding of host-STI coevolution is limited. Here, I present a model of acute STI infection in populations with ephemeral mating dynamics, where hosts evolve their preference for healthy mates and STIs evolve mortality or sterility virulence. Mate choice readily evolves even though ephemeral mating and acute infections reduce...
Males and females feature strikingly different phenotypes, despite sharing most of their genome. A resolution of this apparent paradox is through differential gene expression, whereby genes are expressed at different levels in each sex. This resolution, however, is likely to be incomplete, leading to conflict between males and females over the optimal expression of genes. We test the hypothesis that gene expression in females is constrained from evolving to its optimum level due to sexually antagonistic...
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