Journal ArticleSystematic biology · October 2024
Accurately reconstructing the reticulate histories of polyploids remains a central challenge for understanding plant evolution. Although phylogenetic networks can provide insights into relationships among polyploid lineages, inferring networks may be hinde ...
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Journal ArticleAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences · October 2024
The dwarf lemurs (Cheirogaleus spp.) of Madagascar are the only obligate hibernators among primates. Despite century-old field accounts of seasonal lethargy, and more recent evidence of hibernation in the western fat-tailed dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus medius ...
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Journal ArticleNature ecology & evolution · September 2024
Global biodiversity is under accelerating threats, and species are succumbing to extinction before being described. Madagascar's biota represents an extreme example of this scenario, with the added complication that much of its endemic biodiversity is cryp ...
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Journal ArticleMicrobiology resource announcements · August 2024
House mice, Mus musculus, are highly adapted to anthropogenic spaces. Fecal samples were collected from house mice entering primate enclosure areas at the Duke Lemur Center (Durham, NC, USA). We identified 14 cressdnavirus and 59 microvirus genomes ...
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Journal ArticleViruses · July 2024
Few studies have addressed viral diversity in lemurs despite their unique evolutionary history on the island of Madagascar and high risk of extinction. Further, while a large number of studies on animal viromes focus on fecal samples, understanding viral d ...
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Journal ArticleCold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology · May 2024
Understanding the processes that drive phenotypic diversification and underpin speciation is key to elucidating how biodiversity has evolved. Although these processes have been studied across a wide array of clades, adaptive radiations (ARs), which are sys ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative physiology. B, Biochemical, systemic, and environmental physiology · April 2024
Hibernation is a widespread metabolic strategy among mammals for surviving periods of food scarcity. During hibernation, animals naturally alternate between metabolically depressed torpor bouts and energetically expensive arousals without ill effects. As a ...
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Journal ArticlePlants People Planet · March 1, 2024
Societal Impact Statement: Recognizing Loudetia-dominated grasslands were widespread prior to human colonization highlights that open ecosystems were and continue to be an important component of Madagascar's biodiversity. A better understanding of the plan ...
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Journal ArticleNature communications · March 2024
Hormones mediate long-range cell communication and play vital roles in physiology, metabolism, and health. Traditionally, endocrinologists have focused on one hormone or organ system at a time. Yet, hormone signaling by its very nature connects cells of di ...
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Journal ArticleViruses · December 2023
The Papillomaviridae are a family of vertebrate-infecting viruses of oncogenic potential generally thought to be host species- and tissue-specific. Despite their phylogenetic relatedness to humans, there is a scarcity of data on papillomaviruses (PV ...
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Journal ArticleSystematic biology · August 2023
Cross-species introgression can have significant impacts on phylogenomic reconstruction of species divergence events. Here, we used simulations to show how the presence of even a small amount of introgression can bias divergence time estimates when gene fl ...
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Journal ArticleViruses · August 2023
The diversity of viruses identified from the various niches of the human oral cavity-from saliva to dental plaques to the surface of the tongue-has accelerated in the age of metagenomics. This rapid expansion demonstrates that our understanding of oral vir ...
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Journal ArticleEcology and evolution · July 2023
Madagascar exhibits exceptionally high levels of biodiversity and endemism. Models to explain the diversification and distribution of species in Madagascar stress the importance of historical variability in climate conditions which may have led to the form ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · June 2023
Comparative analysis of primate genomes within a phylogenetic context is essential for understanding the evolution of human genetic architecture and primate diversity. We present such a study of 50 primate species spanning 38 genera and 14 families, includ ...
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Journal ArticleArchives of virology · December 2022
Papillomaviruses (PVs) are host-species-specific and tissue-specific viruses that infect a diverse array of vertebrate hosts, including humans and non-human primates, with varying pathogenic outcomes. Although primate PVs have been studied extensively, no ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · October 2022
Madagascar's Central Highlands are largely composed of grasslands, interspersed with patches of forest. The historical perspective was that Madagascar's grasslands had anthropogenic origins, but emerging evidence suggests that grasslands were a component o ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · August 2022
Microsatellites have been a workhorse of evolutionary genetic studies for decades and are still commonly in use for estimating signatures of genetic diversity at the population and species level across a multitude of taxa. Yet, the very high mutation rate ...
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Journal ArticleFEMS microbiology ecology · July 2022
The gut microbiome can mediate host metabolism, including facilitating energy-saving strategies like hibernation. The dwarf lemurs of Madagascar (Cheirogaleus spp.) are the only obligate hibernators among primates. They also hibernate in the subtropics, an ...
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Journal ArticleGenes · May 2022
The occurrence of natural hybridization has been reported in a wide range of organisms, including primates. The present study focuses on the endemic lemurs of Madagascar, primates for which only a few species occur in sympatry or parapatry with congeners, ...
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Journal ArticlePhysiological and biochemical zoology : PBZ · March 2022
AbstractHibernation, a metabolic strategy, allows individuals to reduce energetic demands in times of energetic deficits. Hibernation is pervasive in nature, occurring in all major mammalian lineages and geographical regions; however, its expression is var ...
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Journal ArticleeLife · January 2022
In the past decade, several studies have estimated the human per-generation germline mutation rate using large pedigrees. More recently, estimates for various nonhuman species have been published. However, methodological differences among studies in detect ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · December 2021
Germline mutations are the raw material for natural selection, driving species evolution and the generation of earth's biodiversity. Without this driver of genetic diversity, life on earth would stagnate. Yet, it is a double-edged sword. An excess of mutat ...
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Journal ArticleInternational Journal of Primatology · December 1, 2021
The gut microbiome is gaining recognition for its role in primate nutrition, but we stand to benefit from microbiome comparisons across diverse hosts and environmental conditions. We compared gut microbiome structure in four lemur species from four phyloge ...
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Journal ArticlePrimates; journal of primatology · November 2021
Habitat fragmentation is one of the major types of anthropogenic change, though fragmented landscapes predate human intervention. At present, the Central Highlands of Madagascar are covered by extensive grasslands interspersed with small discrete forest pa ...
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Journal ArticleFrontiers in Ecology and Evolution · October 6, 2021
The lemurs of Madagascar include numerous species characterized by folivory across several families. Many extant lemuriform folivores exist in sympatry in Madagascar’s remaining forests. These species avoid feeding competition by adopting different dietary ...
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Journal ArticleHeredity · August 2021
Mutations are the raw material on which evolution acts, and knowledge of their frequency and genomic distribution is crucial for understanding how evolution operates at both long and short timescales. At present, the rate and spectrum of de novo mutations ...
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Journal ArticleBMC genomics · August 2021
BackgroundNucleotide excision repair is the primary DNA repair mechanism that removes bulky DNA adducts such as UV-induced pyrimidine dimers. Correspondingly, genome-wide mapping of nucleotide excision repair with eXcision Repair sequencing (XR-se ...
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ConferenceProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · June 2021
No endemic Madagascar animal with body mass >10 kg survived a relatively recent wave of extinction on the island. From morphological and isotopic analyses of skeletal "subfossil" remains we can reconstruct some of the biology and behavioral ecology of gian ...
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Journal ArticleScience advances · April 2021
Sifakas (genus Propithecus) are critically endangered, large-bodied diurnal lemurs that eat leaf-based diets and show corresponding anatomical and microbial adaptations to folivory. We report on the genome assembly of Coquerel's sifaka (P. coquer ...
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Journal ArticleSystematic biology · February 2021
Featured Publication
Mouse lemurs (Microcebus) are a radiation of morphologically cryptic primates distributed throughout Madagascar for which the number of recognized species has exploded in the past two decades. This taxonomic revision has prompted understandable concern tha ...
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Journal ArticleTrends in genetics : TIG · November 2020
Molecular data have been used to date species divergences ever since they were described as documents of evolutionary history in the 1960s. Yet, an inadequate fossil record and discordance between gene trees and species trees are persistently problematic. ...
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Journal ArticleConservation Genetics · October 1, 2020
Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot that is facing rapid rates of deforestation, habitat destruction, and poverty. Urgent action is required to document the status of biodiversity to facilitate efficacious conservation plans. With the recent advent of por ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · September 2020
Delimitation of cryptic species is increasingly based on genetic analyses but the integration of distributional, morphological, behavioral, and ecological data offers unique complementary insights into species diversification. We surveyed communities of no ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular biology and evolution · May 2020
A labeled gene tree topology that is more probable than the labeled gene tree topology matching a species tree is called "anomalous." Species trees that can generate such anomalous gene trees are said to be in the "anomaly zone." Here, probabilities of "un ...
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Journal ArticleHeredity · January 2020
Madagascar's biodiversity is notoriously threatened by deforestation and climate change. Many of these organisms are rare, cryptic, and severely threatened, making population-level sampling unrealistic. Such is the case with Madagascar's dwarf lemurs (genu ...
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Journal ArticleGenome Biol Evol · January 1, 2020
Sensory gene families are of special interest for both what they can tell us about molecular evolution and what they imply as mediators of social communication. The vomeronasal type-1 receptors (V1Rs) have often been hypothesized as playing a fundamental r ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · October 2019
Research on animal microbiomes is increasingly aimed at determining the evolutionary and ecological factors that govern host-microbiome dynamics, which are invariably intertwined and potentially synergistic. We present three empirical studies related to th ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular biology and evolution · October 2019
Current phylogenomic approaches implicitly assume that the predominant phylogenetic signal within a genome reflects the true evolutionary history of organisms, without assessing the confounding effects of postspeciation gene flow that can produce a mosaic ...
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Journal ArticleJ Med Imaging (Bellingham) · April 2019
Three-dimensional (3D) printing has significantly impacted the quality, efficiency, and reproducibility of preclinical magnetic resonance imaging. It has vastly expanded the ability to produce MR-compatible parts that readily permit customization of animal ...
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Journal ArticleBiological Journal of the Linnean Society · August 1, 2018
As is true of virtually every realm of the biological sciences, our understanding of speciation is increasingly informed by the genomic revolution of the past decade. Investigators can ask detailed questions relating to both the extrinsic (e.g. inter- and ...
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Journal ArticleMicrobial ecology · July 2018
Bamboo specialization is one of the most extreme examples of convergent herbivory, yet it is unclear how this specific high-fiber diet might selectively shape the composition of the gut microbiome compared to host phylogeny. To address these questions, we ...
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Journal ArticleSystematic biology · July 2018
Primates have long been a test case for the development of phylogenetic methods for divergence time estimation. Despite a large number of studies, however, the timing of origination of crown Primates relative to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary and ...
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Journal ArticleEvolutionary anthropology · July 2018
Living nonhuman primates generally inhabit tropical forests, and torpor is regarded as a strategy employed by cold-adapted organisms. Yet, some primates employ daily torpor or hibernation (heterothermy) under obligatory, temporary, or emergency circumstanc ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular biology and evolution · June 2018
Kimura's neutral theory of molecular evolution has been essential to virtually every advance in evolutionary genetics, and by extension, is foundational to the field of conservation genetics. Conservation genetics utilizes the key concepts of neutral theor ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · April 2018
Microbiologists often evaluate microbial community dynamics by formulating functional hypotheses based on ecological processes. Indeed, many of the methods and terms currently used to describe animal microbiomes derive from ecology and evolutionary biology ...
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Journal ArticleChromosome research : an international journal on the molecular, supramolecular and evolutionary aspects of chromosome biology · March 2018
Alu elements are a highly successful family of primate-specific retrotransposons that have fundamentally shaped primate evolution, including the evolution of our own species. Alus play critical roles in the formation of neurological networks and the epigen ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · February 2018
Hibernation is an adaptive strategy some mammals use to survive highly seasonal or unpredictable environments. We present the first investigation on the transcriptomics of hibernation in a natural population of primate hibernators: Crossley's dwarf lemurs ...
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Journal ArticleGut microbes · January 2018
Many studies have demonstrated the effects of host diet on gut microbial membership, metagenomics, and fermentation individually; but few have attempted to interpret the relationship among these biological phenomena with respect to host features (e.g. gut ...
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Journal ArticleBMC Biol · November 16, 2017
BACKGROUND: The de novo assembly of repeat-rich mammalian genomes using only high-throughput short read sequencing data typically results in highly fragmented genome assemblies that limit downstream applications. Here, we present an iterative approach to h ...
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Journal ArticleAlzheimers Dement · July 2017
It is hypothesized that retrotransposons have played a fundamental role in primate evolution and that enhanced neurologic retrotransposon activity in humans may underlie the origin of higher cognitive function. As a potential consequence of this enhanced a ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative physiology. B, Biochemical, systemic, and environmental physiology · May 2017
One of the most obvious physiological changes accompanying seasonal heterothermy in mammals is a fattening stage preceding periods of resource scarcity. This phenomenon reflects the interplay of both diet and physiology. Though the accrual of fat stores is ...
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Journal ArticleeLife · March 2017
Many discoveries in the life sciences have been made using material from living stock collections. These collections provide a uniform and stable supply of living organisms and related materials that enhance the reproducibility of research and minimize the ...
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Journal ArticleMicrobial ecology in health and disease · January 2017
Background: The gut microbiome (GMB) is the first line of defense against enteric pathogens, which are a leading cause of disease and mortality worldwide. One such pathogen, the protozoan Cryptosporidium, causes a variety of digestive disorde ...
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Journal ArticleInternational Journal of Primatology · December 1, 2016
Population decline and fragmentation often lead to reduced genetic diversity and population differentiation. Habitat destruction throughout Madagascar has caused population decline and extinction of many endemic species. Lemur populations, including those ...
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Journal ArticleGenome biology and evolution · August 2016
Hibernation is a complex physiological response that some mammalian species employ to evade energetic demands. Previous work in mammalian hibernators suggests that hibernation is activated not by a set of genes unique to hibernators, but by differential ex ...
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Journal ArticleR Soc Open Sci · August 2016
During hibernation, critical physiological processes are downregulated and thermogenically induced arousals are presumably needed periodically to fulfil those physiological demands. Among the processes incompatible with a hypome tabolic state is sleep. How ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · July 2016
Phylogeographic analysis can be described as the study of the geological and climatological processes that have produced contemporary geographic distributions of populations and species. Here, we attempt to understand how the dynamic process of landscape c ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · May 2016
Implementation of the coalescent model in a Bayesian framework is an emerging strength in genetically based species delimitation studies. By providing an objective measure of species diagnosis, these methods represent a quantitative enhancement to the anal ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · May 2016
Madagascar's lemurs display a diverse array of feeding strategies with complex relationships to seed dispersal mechanisms in Malagasy plants. Although these relationships have been explored previously on a case-by-case basis, we present here the first comp ...
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Journal ArticleBiology letters · January 2016
Zoonotic diseases are a looming threat to global populations, and nearly 75% of emerging infectious diseases can spread among wildlife, domestic animals and humans. A 'One World, One Health' perspective offers us an ideal framework for understanding and po ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular phylogenetics and evolution · November 2015
The rainforest biome of eastern Madagascar is renowned for its extraordinary biodiversity and restricted distribution ranges of many species, whereas the arid western region of the island is relatively species poor. We provide insight into the biogeography ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology resources · September 2015
DNA quantity can be a hindrance in ecological and evolutionary research programmes due to a range of factors including endangered status of target organisms, available tissue type, and the impact of field conditions on preservation methods. A potential sol ...
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Journal ArticleEcology and Evolution · March 1, 2015
Geospatial modeling is one of the most powerful tools available to conservation biologists for estimating current species ranges of Earth's biodiversity. Now, with the advantage of predictive climate models, these methods can be deployed for understanding ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of human evolution · February 2015
Humans first arrived on Madagascar only a few thousand years ago. Subsequent habitat destruction and hunting activities have had significant impacts on the island's biodiversity, including the extinction of megafauna. For example, we know of 17 recently ex ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of evolutionary biology · February 2015
Although numerous studies have attempted to find single unifying mechanisms for generating Madagascar's unique flora and fauna, little consensus has been reached regarding the relative importance of climatic, geologic and ecological processes as catalysts ...
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Journal ArticleEcology and Evolution · 2015
Geospatial modeling is one of the most powerful tools available to conservation biologists for estimating current species ranges of Earth’s biodiversity. Now, with the advantage of predictive climate models, these methods can be deployed for understanding ...
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Journal ArticleGut Microbes · 2015
The microbiome is now widely recognized as being important in health and disease, and makes up a substantial subset of the biome within the ecosystem of the vertebrate body. At the same time, multicellular, eukaryotic organisms such as helminths are being ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2015
Host fitness is impacted by trillions of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract that facilitate development and are inextricably tied to life history. During development, microbial colonization primes the gut metabolism and physiology, thereby setting the ...
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Journal ArticleActa Chiropterologica · December 1, 2014
The Mauritius flying fox Pteropus niger is distributed on the islands of Mauritius and La Réunion in the western Indian Ocean. Although recent studies have examined the phylogenetics and systematics of this genus, relatively few have assessed the populatio ...
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Journal ArticleActa Chiropterologica · December 1, 2014
The pteropodid fruit bat genus Eidolon is comprised of two extant species: E. dupreanum on Madagascar and E. helvum on the African mainland and offshore islands. Recent population genetic studies of E. helvum indicate widespread panmixia across the contine ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology resources · November 2014
High-throughput sequencing platforms are generating massive amounts of genomic data from nonmodel species, and these data sets are valuable resources that can be mined to advance a number of research areas. An example is the growing amount of transcriptome ...
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Journal ArticleNature communications · October 2014
Pattern and process are inextricably linked in biogeographic analyses, though we can observe pattern, we must infer process. Inferences of process are often based on ad hoc comparisons using a single spatial predictor. Here, we present an alternative appro ...
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Journal ArticleIntegrative and comparative biology · September 2014
In recent years, the study of the molecular processes involved in mammalian hibernation has shifted from investigating a few carefully selected candidate genes to large-scale analysis of differential gene expression. The availability of high-throughput dat ...
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Journal ArticleIntegrative and comparative biology · September 2014
This collection of articles is focused on the evolutionary dynamics of heterothermy in mammals, specifically torpor and hibernation. Topics cover a wide range from evolutionary genetics, physiology, ecology, and applications to human health. ...
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Journal ArticleBMC genomics · August 2014
BackgroundMolecular characterization of highly diverse gene families can be time consuming, expensive, and difficult, especially when considering the potential for relatively large numbers of paralogs and/or pseudogenes. Here we investigate the ut ...
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Journal ArticleRetrovirology · August 2014
BackgroundFoamy viruses (FVs) are a unique subfamily of retroviruses that are widely distributed in mammals. Owing to the availability of sequences from diverse mammals coupled with their pattern of codivergence with their hosts, FVs have one of t ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of evolutionary biology · June 2014
The stochastic process of long-distance dispersal is the exclusive means by which plants colonize oceanic islands. Baker's rule posits that self-incompatible plant lineages are unlikely to successfully colonize oceanic islands because they must achieve a c ...
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Journal ArticleBMC evolutionary biology · March 2014
BackgroundDebate continues as to whether allopatric speciation or peripatric speciation through a founder effect is the predominant force driving evolution in vertebrates. The mouse lemurs of Madagascar are a system in which evolution has generate ...
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Journal ArticleGenome biology and evolution · January 2014
Vomeronasal receptor genes have frequently been invoked as integral to the establishment and maintenance of species boundaries among mammals due to the elaborate one-to-one correspondence between semiochemical signals and neuronal sensory inputs. Here, we ...
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Journal ArticleEvolutionary anthropology · January 2014
Debate over what is a species was already considered old hat when Darwin wrote his seminal abstract (as he called it) more than 150 years ago.(1) Endless papers, workshops, and symposia have been presented in an effort to "solve" the species problem. Yet, ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2014
BackgroundAn understanding of the conservation status of Madagascar's endemic reptile species is needed to underpin conservation planning and priority setting in this global biodiversity hotspot, and to complement existing information on the islan ...
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Journal ArticleFrontiers in neuroanatomy · January 2014
Olfaction plays a critical role in both survival of the individual and in the propagation of species. Studies from across the mammalian clade have found a remarkable correlation between organismal lifestyle and molecular evolutionary properties of receptor ...
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Journal ArticleScientific data · January 2014
Since its establishment in 1966, the Duke Lemur Center (DLC) has accumulated detailed records for nearly 4,200 individuals from over 40 strepsirrhine primate taxa-the lemurs, lorises, and galagos. Here we present verified data for 3,627 individuals of 27 t ...
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Journal ArticleBiological Journal of the Linnean Society · November 1, 2013
Numerous hypotheses have been proposed for the historical processes governing the rich endemism of Madagascar's biodiversity. The 'watershed model' suggests that drier climates in the recent geological past have resulted in the contraction of forests aroun ...
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Journal ArticleInternational Journal of Primatology · June 1, 2013
The number of newly discovered Malagasy vertebrate taxa has multiplied in recent years, emphasizing the importance of complete taxon sampling for phylogenetics, biogeography, functional ecology, and conservation biology, especially in such a biodiversity h ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular phylogenetics and evolution · February 2013
Morris Goodman was a revolutionary. Together with a mere handful of like-minded scientists, Morris established himself as a leader in the molecular phylogenetic revolution of the 1960s. The effects of this revolution are most evident in this journal, which ...
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Journal ArticleScientific reports · January 2013
Hibernation in mammals is a remarkable state of heterothermy wherein metabolic rates are reduced, core body temperatures reach ambient levels, and key physiological functions are suspended. Typically, hibernation is observed in cold-adapted mammals, though ...
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Journal ArticleZootaxa · January 2013
The sagebrush lizards (Sceloporus graciosus group) consist of four taxa (S. graciosus graciosus, S. graciosus gracilis, S. graciosus vandenburgianus, and S. arenicolus) distributed in western North America. Of these, S. arenicolus is morphologically, behav ...
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Journal ArticlePLoS One · 2013
STUDY OBJECTIVES: It has long been suspected that sleep is important for regulating body temperature and metabolic-rate. Hibernation, a state of acute hypothermia and reduced metabolic-rate, offers a promising system for investigating those relationships. ...
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Journal ArticleSystematic Botany · October 1, 2012
Resolving phylogenetic relationships within the economically important genus Coffea (Rubiaceae) has proven to be difficult due to low levels of plastid and nuclear ITS sequence divergence. The recent identification of a large number of conserved, single-co ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · August 2012
Understanding the remarkably high species diversity and levels of endemism found among Madagascar's flora and fauna has been the focus of many studies. One hypothesis that has received much attention proposes that Quaternary climate fluctuations spurred di ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular biology and evolution · June 2012
The systematics and speciation literature is rich with discussion relating to the potential for gene tree/species tree discordance. Numerous mechanisms have been proposed to generate discordance, including differential selection, long-branch attraction, ge ...
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Journal ArticleGenome research · April 2012
Comparative genomic studies in primates have yielded important insights into the evolutionary forces that shape genetic diversity and revealed the likely genetic basis for certain species-specific adaptations. To date, however, these studies have focused o ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · July 2011
Anthropogenic habitat disturbance impairs ecosystem health by fragmenting forested areas, introducing environmental contamination, and reducing the quality of habitat resources. The effect of this disturbance on wildlife health is of particular concern in ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular phylogenetics and evolution · May 2011
The field of phylogeography continues to grow in terms of power and accessibility. Initially uniting population genetics and phylogenetics, it now spans disciplines as diverse as geology, statistics, climatology, ecology, physiology, and bioinformatics to ...
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Journal ArticlePLoS currents · March 2011
Fruit bats of the genus Pteropus occur throughout the Austral-Asian region west to islands off the eastern coast of Africa. Recent phylogenetic analyses of Pteropus from the western Indian Ocean found low sequence divergence and poor phylogenetic resolutio ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2011
Self-incompatibility (SI) is widespread in the angiosperms, but identifying the biochemical components of SI mechanisms has proven to be difficult in most lineages. Coffea (coffee; Rubiaceae) is a genus of old-world tropical understory trees in which the v ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of mammalogy · June 2010
We examined patterns of genetic variation in Rousettus madagascariensis from Madagascar and R. obliviosus from the Comoros (Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Mohéli). Genetic distances among individuals on the basis of 1,130 base pairs of the mitoc ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · March 2010
BackgroundSpeciation begins when populations become genetically separated through a substantial reduction in gene flow, and it is at this point that a genetically cohesive set of populations attain the sole property of species: the independent evo ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular phylogenetics and evolution · January 2010
Approximately 20 years ago, Avise and colleagues proposed the integration of phylogenetics and population genetics for investigating the connection between micro- and macroevolutionary phenomena. The new field was termed phylogeography. Since the naming of ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular phylogenetics and evolution · May 2009
We investigate the genetic relationships between purported island species of Pteropus fruit bat (Megachiroptera) from the western Indian Ocean islands using mitochondrial DNA sequencing in order to infer the pattern of colonisation of this biogeographic re ...
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Journal ArticleBMC evolutionary biology · February 2009
BackgroundSpecies are viewed as the fundamental unit in most subdisciplines of biology. To conservationists this unit represents the currency for global biodiversity assessments. Even though Madagascar belongs to one of the top eight biodiversity ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular phylogenetics and evolution · February 2009
The endemic plated lizards (Gerrhosauridae) of Madagascar are one of the most diverse groups of lizards on the island (19 species) and are found in all ecoregions. On an island that presents so many interesting biological questions, plated lizards are an i ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology resources · January 2009
We report the development of 18, single-copy, anonymous nuclear loci from the Malagasy plated lizard Zonosaurus madagascariensis. More than 140 clones from a genomic library were examined and 38 potential loci tested across both closely and distantly relat ...
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Journal ArticleGenome research · March 2008
Lemurs and the other strepsirrhine primates are of great interest to the primate genomics community due to their phylogenetic placement as the sister lineage to all other primates. Previous attempts to resolve the phylogeny of lemurs employed limited mitoc ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Mammalogy · February 1, 2008
The chiropteran family Myzopodidae is endemic to Madagascar and is characterized by several unique morphologies, such as sessile adhesive discs on the thumb and sole. A new species, Myzopoda schliemanni, was recently described from western Madagascar that ...
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Journal ArticleProgress in Physical Geography · January 1, 2008
We review the expanding role of molecular genetics in the emergence of a vibrant and vital integrative biogeography. The enormous growth over the past several decades in the number and variety of molecular-based phylogenetic and population genetics studies ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular phylogenetics and evolution · May 2007
Mouse lemurs (genus Microcebus) are nocturnal primates endemic to the island of Madagascar. Until recently, they were classified as two species, one from eastern and one from western Madagascar. Previously published analyses of morphometric and mitochondri ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular biology of the cell · April 2007
GPI membrane anchors of cell surface glycoproteins have been shown to confer functional properties that are different from their transmembrane (TM)-anchored counterparts. For the human carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) family, a subfamily of the immunoglobuli ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · February 2007
New applications of genetic data to questions of historical biogeography have revolutionized our understanding of how organisms have come to occupy their present distributions. Phylogenetic methods in combination with divergence time estimation can reveal ...
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Journal ArticleAnnual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics · December 18, 2006
Madagascar is one of the world's hottest biodiversity hot spots due to its diverse, endemic, and highly threatened biota. This biota shows a distinct signature of evolution in isolation, both in the high levels of diversity within lineages and in the imbal ...
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Journal ArticleBMC evolutionary biology · November 2006
BackgroundThe past decade has seen a remarkable increase in the number of recognized mouse lemur species (genus Microcebus). As recently as 1994, only two species of mouse lemur were recognized according to the rules of zoological nomenclature. Th ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Museum Novitates · January 1, 2006
We describe a new species of bat in the genus Emballonura (Chiroptera: Emballonuridae), E. tiavato, from the dry forest regions of Madagascar. This species is distinguished from the only other member of this genus found on the island, E. atrata, and extral ...
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Chapter · October 28, 2005
The biodiversity of Madagascar is extraordinarily distinctive, diverse, and endangered. It is therefore urgent that steps be taken to document, describe, interpret, and protect this exceptional biota. As a collaborative group of field and laboratory biolog ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · October 2005
It is firmly believed that ancestral primates were nocturnal, with nocturnality having been maintained in most prosimian lineages. Under this traditional view, the opsin genes in all nocturnal prosimians should have undergone similar degrees of functional ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · May 2005
The biodiversity of Madagascar is extraordinarily distinctive, diverse, and endangered. It is therefore urgent that steps be taken to document, describe, interpret, and protect this exceptional biota. As a collaborative group of field and laboratory biolog ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · April 2005
The living Malagasy lemurs constitute a spectacular radiation of >50 species that are believed to have evolved from a common ancestor that colonized Madagascar in the early Tertiary period. Yet, at least 15 additional Malagasy primate species, some of whic ...
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Journal ArticleBiological Journal of the Linnean Society · September 1, 2004
The increasing use of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to explore and test species limits among morphologically similar species is potentially compromised by phenomena poorly reflective of organismal history and speciation, including (but not limited to) stochast ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular ecology · April 2004
The lemurs of Madagascar are a unique radiation of primates that show an extraordinary diversity of lifestyles, morphologies and behaviours. However, very little is known about the relative antiquity of lemuriform clades due to the lack of terrestrial foss ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of virology · November 2003
A chemokine receptor from the seven-transmembrane-domain G-protein-coupled receptor superfamily is an essential coreceptor for the cellular entry of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) strains. To investigate ...
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Journal ArticleSystematic biology · October 2003
Divergence time and substitution rate are seriously confounded in phylogenetic analysis, making it difficult to estimate divergence times when the molecular clock (rate constancy among lineages) is violated. This problem can be alleviated to some extent by ...
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Journal ArticleNature · February 2003
The Carnivora are one of only four orders of terrestrial mammals living in Madagascar today. All four (carnivorans, primates, rodents and lipotyphlan insectivores) are placental mammals with limited means for dispersal, yet they occur on a large island tha ...
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Journal ArticleInternational Journal of Plant Sciences · January 1, 2003
The phylogeny of Rosoideae was investigated using 44 species. Here we report new sequence data from the chloroplast trnL/F region as well as an increased sample of species. The analysis of these new data, along with previously used data from the nuclear ri ...
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Journal ArticleInternational Journal of Primatology · December 1, 2002
Recent morphological and molecular phylogenetic studies of mouse lemurs (Microcebus) living in the western and southern regions of Madagascar have shown that specific diversity had been considerably underestimated. In large part, this underestimate was due ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular biology and evolution · January 2002
The identification of inadvertently sequenced mitochondrial pseudogenes (numts) is critical to any study employing mitochondrial DNA sequence data. Failure to discriminate numts correctly can confound phylogenetic reconstruction and studies of molecular ev ...
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Journal ArticleSystematic biology · June 2001
Tests for incongruence as an indicator of among-data partition conflict have played an important role in conditional data combination. When such tests reveal significant incongruence, this has been interpreted as a rationale for not combining data into a s ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · October 2000
Phylogenetic analysis of mtDNA sequence data confirms the observation that species diversity in the world's smallest living primate (genus Microcebus) has been greatly underestimated. The description of three species new to science, and the resurrection of ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Zoology · September 25, 2000
A recent survey of the high-mountain zone of the Madagascar Parc National (PN) d'Andringitra revealed the presence of an apparently isolated troop of the ring-tailed lemur Lemur catta. These animals display phenotypic and ecological characteristics that ar ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular biology and evolution · July 2000
Protein-coding genes of the mitochondrial genomes from 31 mammalian species were analyzed to estimate the speciation dates within primates and also between rats and mice. Three calibration points were used based on paleontological data: one at 20-25 MYA fo ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of molecular evolution · March 1999
The transition/transversion (ti/tv) rate ratios are estimated by pairwise sequence comparison and joint likelihood analysis using mitochondrial cytochrome b genes of 28 primate species, representing both the Strepsirrhini (lemurs and lories) and the Anthro ...
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Journal ArticleCladistics · January 1, 1999
DNA sequences from three mitochondrial genes and one nuclear gene were analyzed to determine the phylogeny of the Malagasy primate family Lemuridae. Whether analyzed separately or in combination, the data consistently indicate that Eulemur species comprise ...
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Journal ArticleEvolutionary Anthropology · January 1, 1997
The strepsirrhine primates, defined here as living tooth-combed primates, their immediate ancestor, and all of its descendants, are a diverse assemblage of mammals, viewed by some as exemplars of the richness of evolutionary innovation and by others as uni ...
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Journal ArticleMolecular biology and evolution · December 1996
DNA sequences of the complete cytochrome b gene are shown to contain robust phylogenetic signal for the strepsirrhine primates (i.e., lemurs and lorises). The phylogeny derived from these data conforms to other molecular studies of strepsirrhine relationsh ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · May 1996
We report new evidence that bears decisively on a long-standing controversy in primate systematics. DNA sequence data for the complete cytochrome b gene, combined with an expanded morphological data set, confirm the results of a previous study and again in ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of physical anthropology · May 1994
An examination of previous morphological and molecular studies of strepsirhine systematics suggests a conflict between the two types of data. Cladistic analyses of morphological data have indicated that the Malagasy primate family Cheirogaleidae is the sis ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropology · January 1, 1992
A nearly complete cranium of Ignacius graybullianus provides increased understanding of the cranial anatomy of Plesiadapiformes. In nearly all details of cranial anatomy, Ignacius differs markedly from primates. USNM 421608 exhibits a long tapering snout, ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Human Evolution · January 1, 1992
Ontogeny and phylogeny together determine organismal form and consequently, the two should be reciprocally illuminating. Ontogeny contributes valuable information for phylogenetic studies, not because it is a window into phylogeny, but because ontogenetic ...
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