In Journal of Mammalogy (Q1 in Zoology), Krzysztof Kowalski and Leszek Rychlik (Department of Systematic Zoology) published a paper on the role of venom in hunting larger prey and food hoarding by the Eurasian water shrew Neomys fodiens (Soricidae). Authors showed, among others, that N. fodiens required significantly less time than the common shrew [...]
In the journal Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part C (Q1 in Zoology), Krzysztof Kowalski, Leszek Rychlik (Department of Systematic Zoology), and co-authors from the Institute of Experimental Biology, Paweł Marciniak and Grzegorz Rosiński (Department of Animal Physiology and Development) recently published a paper with the new results demonstrating strong cardio- and myotropic properties, and low [...]
One widely accepted fitness advantage of being a masting plant (instead of just producing seeds every year) is the predator satiation. According to this mechanism, masting helps to increase seed survival through starving predators in non-mast years (famine cause the predator population to go decrease in numbers), and sparse predators are easy satiated in mast [...]
High-throughput sequencing (HTS) prompted development of novel, refined methods of analyzing immunological repertoires (e.g. immunoglobulins, TCRs). So far, despite a decade of progress, these techniques were mainly used in research involving model species and humans. Recently, Magdalena Migalska, Alvaro Sebastian and Jacek Radwan (Evolutionary Biology Group) published an article in Scientific Reports describing first use of HTS in TCR repertoire sequencing [...]
New study describing how apparent predation occurring between two sympatric oaks influence their recruitment rates was just published in Journal of Ecology. The Authors (Michał Bogdziewicz, Nathanael Lichti, Rafał Zwolak) wrote a short summary of their work: Numerous plants are dispersed by scatterhoarding animals such as corvids and rodents. These animals carry away and cache [...]
The paper by Bogdziewicz et al. on the role of environmental constraints in mast seeding was published in the latest issue of New Phytologist. We wrote about the research in the past post (link). In the same issue, Tanentzap & Monks published a positive commentary on that research. https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/nph.15219
The article by Lechosław Kuczyński and Anna Skoracka (Population Ecology Lab) and cooperators from the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic was published in the Journal of Animal Ecology. The study shows how birds avoid their sibling-species competitors. Data were collected by skilled volunteers within the Common Breeding Bird Survey in Poland. The link to [...]
In "New Phytologist" journal the article co-authored by Michał Bogdziewicz (Department of Systematic Zoology) entitled "Correlated seed failure as an environmental veto to synchronize reproduction of masting plants" was published. What Michał talks about the research: Variable, synchronized seed production, called masting, is a widespread reproductive strategy in plants. Numerous ideas were proposed to explain [...]
The article by Natalia Olejnik, Zbigniew Celka and Piotr Szkudlarz (Department of Plant Taxonomy) and Myroslava V. Shevera (M. G. Kholodny Institute of Botany, NAS of Ukraine) was published in “Review of Paleobotany and Palynology”. The article focuses on the taxonomical importance of morphological traits of spores in the family Ophioglossaceae (Psilotopsida). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034666717302075
The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is one of the most polymorphic gene families in the vertebrate genome, with natural selection actively promoting and maintaining variability. The exact mechanism/mechanisms responsible for these characteristics re-main unclear, but identifying them is fundamental to our understanding of host–pathogen dynamics. Using targeted crosses of the model Trinidadian guppy, a tractable [...]
