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Full-Text Articles in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The Microbiome In Light Of Host Evolution, Alexander M. Waldrop Jr.
The Microbiome In Light Of Host Evolution, Alexander M. Waldrop Jr.
Theses and Dissertations
Recent advances in sequencing technologies have provided an unprecedented window in the unseen biological world. Accompanying this revolution is a growing appreciation for the ubiquity and diversity of beneficial interactions between animals and the microbes they carry. Given the symbiotic roles of microbes in host nutrition, immunity, behavior, development, and nearly every other facet of host biology, it is becoming increasingly clear that any understanding of hosts and their evolution would be incomplete without also considering the microbial dimension. Yet despite the growing body of evidence that many of these partnerships are rooted deep in evolutionary time, the majority of …
Genome Wide Epigenetic Analyses Of Araptus Attenuatus, A Bark Beetle, Chitra Seshadri
Genome Wide Epigenetic Analyses Of Araptus Attenuatus, A Bark Beetle, Chitra Seshadri
Theses and Dissertations
Phylogeographic studies have relied on surveying neutral genetic variation in natural populations as a way of gaining better insights into the evolutionary processes shaping present day population demography. Recent emphasis on understanding putative adaptive variation have brought to light the role of epigenetic variation in influencing phenotypes and the mechanisms underlying local adaptation. While much is known about how methylation acts at specific loci to influence known phenotypes, there is little information on the spatial genetic structure of genome-wide patterns of methylation and the extent to which it can extend our understanding of both neutral and putatively adaptive processes. This …
Landscape Genetics Of The American Badger: Understanding Challenges In Elusive Species, Elizabeth Marie Kierepka
Landscape Genetics Of The American Badger: Understanding Challenges In Elusive Species, Elizabeth Marie Kierepka
Theses and Dissertations
American badgers are one of the most poorly understood carnivores in North America due to their highly elusive, semifossorial lifestyle. To complicate understanding their biology further, badgers possess life history characteristics that predict radically different responses to habitat heterogeneity. In particular, they are considered grassland specialists, so their movement and population viability could be highly dependent on grassland habitats. Badgers are also highly mobile, which suggests they experience high gene flow. Predicting how these life history traits impact gene flow, however, is difficult based on the high diversity in responses to landscape heterogeneity among carnivores. To assess how landscape heterogeneity …