Preprints
There are 2486 Preprints listed.
The untapped potential of phage model systems as therapeutic agents
Published: 2023-07-28
Subjects: Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Medical Microbiology, Microbiology
With the emergence of widespread antibiotic resistance, phages are an appealing alternative to antibiotics in the fight against multidrug-resistant bacteria. Over the past few years, many phages have been isolated from various environments to treat bacterial pathogens. While isolating novel phages for treatment has had some success for compassionate use, developing novel phages into a general [...]
Sources, effects and present perspectives of heavy metals contamination: soil, plants and human food chain
Published: 2023-07-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Heavy metal (HM) poisoning of agricultural soils poses a serious risk to plant life, human health, and global food supply. When HM levels in agricultural soils get to dangerous levels, it harms crop health and yield. Chromium (Cr), arsenic (As), nickel (Ni), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), zinc (Zn), and copper (Cu) are the main heavy metals. The environment contains these metals in [...]
How does dispersal shape the genetic patterns of animal populations in European cities? A simulation approach
Published: 2023-07-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Context and objectives Although urbanization is a major driver of biodiversity erosion, it does not affect all species equally. The neutral genetic structure of populations in a given species is affected by both genetic drift and gene flow processes. In cities, the size of animal populations determines drift and can depend on multiple processes whereas gene flow essentially depends on the [...]
Practical guidelines and the EMLN R package for handling ecological multilayer networks
Published: 2023-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Network analysis provides a powerful framework to study the complexity underlying the structure, dynamics, stability, and function of ecological systems. By now, analysing single-layered networks is a common practice with clear guidelines and well-established computational tools. Nevertheless, ecological communities are multilayered because they vary over space and time and contain multiple types [...]
Absence of the pace-of-life syndrome in a wild-living population of cooperatively-breeding passerine
Published: 2023-07-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The pace-of-life syndrome hypothesis posits that consistent between-individual variation in behavioral traits (‘animal personalities’) mediates trade-offs in life-history. Individuals with risk-averse traits are expected to follow a relatively ‘slow’ pace-of-life (long lifespan, delayed reproduction), compared to their riskier, ‘fast’, counterparts. Despite a breadth of empirical research, [...]
Multimodel approaches are not the best way to understand multifactorial systems
Published: 2023-07-23
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Information-theoretic (IT) and multi-model averaging (MMA) statistical approaches are widely used but suboptimal tools for pursuing a multifactorial approach (also known as the method of multiple working hypotheses) in ecology. (1) Conceptually, IT encourages ecologists to perform tests on sets of artificial models. (2) MMA improves on IT model selection by implementing a simple form of [...]
Building an Inclusive Botany: The “Radicle” Dream
Published: 2023-07-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Driven by the national conversation on systemic racism, ongoing inequities, appeals to decolonize science, and the many recent calls for diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion, we use stories of plants to discuss the history of bias and exclusionary practices in scientific botany, particularly regarding access to scientific spaces, and the exploitation of marginalized peoples. We discuss [...]
Collating existing evidence on cumulative impacts of invasive plant species in riparian ecosystems of British Columbia, Canada: a systematic map protocol
Published: 2023-07-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Background Globally, the structure and functioning of foreshore and riparian ecosystems are being dramatically impacted by non-native invasive plant species. Invasive species can outcompete and replace native species, modify geochemical and hydraulic cycles, alter trophic processes, and change the composition and structure of communities above and below ground. However, these impacts are often [...]
Artificial light at night (ALAN) influences understory plant traits through ecological processes: a two-year experiment in a rubber plantation in China
Published: 2023-07-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Artificial light at night (ALAN) demonstrated a new ecological factor that influences organisms through multi-approach. Yet, the impacts of ALAN on understory plants remain largely unknown. We evaluated whether ALAN would affect leaf mass per area (LMA) of understory plants through a two-year field light experiment in a tropical rubber plantation in south China. We hypothesized that ALAN could [...]
Intergenerational plasticity aligns with temperature-dependent selection on offspring metabolic rates
Published: 2023-07-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Metabolic rates are linked to key life history traits that are thought to set the pace of life and affect fitness, yet the role that parents may have in shaping the metabolism of their offspring to enhance survival remains unclear. Here, we investigated the effect of temperature (24 C or 30 C) and feeding frequency experienced by parent zebrafish (Danio rerio) on offspring phenotypes and early [...]
Microbial invasions and inoculants: a call to action
Published: 2023-07-18
Subjects: Biosecurity, Biotechnology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences
The use of non-genetically modified microbial inoculants for beneficial purposes in agriculture, bioremediation, medicine, and infrastructure is increasing. The intentional introduction of plants and animals for similar purposes has a long history, but despite successes, has resulted in thousands of plant and animal species becoming invasive, with catastrophic consequences for the environment, [...]
The evolutionary dynamics of plastic foraging and its ecological consequences: a resource-consumer model
Published: 2023-07-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Phenotypic plasticity has important ecological and evolutionary consequences. In particular, behavioural phenotypic plasticity such as plastic foraging (PF) by consumers, may enhance community stability. Yet little is known about the ecological conditions that favor the evolution of PF, and how the evolutionary dynamics of PF may modulate its effects on community stability. In order to address [...]
Recent human-bear conflicts in Northern Italy: a review, with considerations of future perspectives
Published: 2023-07-17
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
The killing of a runner in Northern Italy by a brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos) and the subsequent investigation of such matter highlighted a Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC) that has been present in Trentino since the introduction of bears for conservation during the Life Ursus Project. Such conflict may be exacerbated as both human and bear populations get bigger. In this paper, I summarize the [...]
Shall we all adopt, with no worries, the ‘within a configuration’ approach in geometric morphometrics? A comment on claims that the effect of the superimposition and sliding on shape data is “not an obstacle to analyses of integration and modularity”
Published: 2023-07-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
The study of modularity and integration using Procrustes geometric morphometrics has become a prominent approach in evolutionary developmental biology. A most popular method is the ‘within a configuration’ approach, often used in combination with ‘high density’ morphometric data (i.e., large numbers of landmarks and semilandmarks). In 2019, I realized that this approach violates a basic [...]
Fixation probability and fixation time under strong recurrent mutation
Published: 2023-07-16
Subjects: Evolution, Life Sciences
When the mutation rate is high and/or the population size is large, recurrent mutation can lead to multiple, independently generated copies of the same beneficial allele spreading through the population. However, classical analyses of fixation probability and time assume that the mutation rate is low and therefore, that fixation and extinction of a beneficial allele occur faster than the [...]