Institute of Environmental Biology, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań | envbiol@amu.edu.pl
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…
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][fusion_text]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…
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…
A paper that describes the mechanisms of mast seeding in oaks, has just been published in the leading biological journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, authored by Michał Bogdziewicz (Department of Systematic Zoology) and collaborators. Mast seeding is a huge, inter-annual variation in seed production, highly synchronized among individual plants. In this…
In the top journal Biological Reviews, Rafał Zwolak (Department of Systematic Zoology) published a paper on the relationships between plants and animals. One of the most fundamental differences between plants and animals is the ability to move. Typically, animals move plenty, whereas plants are literally rooted in place and travel only at the stage of…