Humans have long sought to understand the forces that shape the diversity of living creatures on our planet. This work is primarily concerned with examining one such force---the historical action of natural selection---from practical, philosophical, and pedagogical perspectives.…
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A atresia biliar é a causa mais comum de colangiopatia obstrutiva infantil e a indicação mais frequente para transplante hepático na população pediátrica. É uma patologia que se inicia exclusivamente na infância e que se caracteriza por uma obstrução de parte ou da totalidade da…
This master thesis addresses a large-scale biogeographical question, the distribution and evolutionary history of a marine species complex with a vast distribution in the northern hemisphere. This complex includes two intertidal brown macroalgae, Fucus spiralis and Fucus guiryi,…
Variation at functional genes involved in immune response is of increasing concern as wildlife diseases continue to emerge and threaten populations. The amount of standing genetic variation in a population is directly associated with its potential for rapid adaptation to novel e…
Reconstructing evolutionary trees, also known as phylogenies, from molecular sequence data is a fundamental problem in computational biology. Classically, evolutionary trees have been estimated over a set of species, where leaves correspond to extant species and internal nodes c…
The tropical rainforests of Africa make up one of the largest rainforest blocks in the world, second only to the Amazon Rainforest of South America. This area hosts an incredible diversity of plants and animals and contains three of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, indicative …
Plant breeding has been enormously successful at increasing crop yields over the course of the 20th century, but further progress that would meet increasing demands for food, fuel, and fiber is threatened by global climate change. Because yield is an environmentally-dependent ph…
A primary objective of state wildlife management agencies is to establish sustainable harvest levels for game species. An important component of sustainable management practices is the identification of appropriate management units for monitoring and establishing defensible harv…
Възпроизводството на човека и динамиката на демографските процеси са един изключително сложен комплекс от икономически, социални, медицински, биологични, психологически, географски, религиозни и морално-етични компоненти, които дават много сериозно отражение върху цялостното раз…
Genetic association analyses have successfully identified thousands of genetic variants contributing to complex disease susceptibility. However, these discoveries do not explain the full heritability of many diseases, due to the limited statistical power to detect loci with smal…
The atopic dermatitis, an inflammatory disease affecting skin, is known to play an important role in allergen sensitization via the damaged skin barrier. This sensitization can lead to allergic diseases such as allergic rhinitis and allergic asthma. The inflammatory reactions le…
Supergenes are chromosomal regions of tightly linked loci experiencing reduced recombination that are inherited as a single unit when heterozygous. Polygenic morphological or behavioral traits can be maintained as distinct morphs, polymorphisms, within a population due to altern…
Connectivity refers to the amount of gene flow present between populations of the same species. The transfer of genetic material between populations allows species to increase their genetic diversity, thus allowing advantageous mutations to spread. When gene flow between populat…
Subsistence strategy—the method by which a population obtains its food—has likely exerted strong selective pressure on humans for much of our evolutionary history. The genomes of 929 individuals from 54 populations in the HDGP-CEPH dataset were analyzed to characterize populatio…
Three TaqMan® real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) assays for species determination and quantification of minute amounts (0.5–5 pg) of mixed-sample nuclear DNA of common livestock and poultry species have been developed. Two of these multiplex assays are designed for livestock (inc…
The New World blackbirds (Icteridae) are among the best known songbirds, both through exemplar species, such as the Red-winged Blackbird ( Agelaius phoeniceus), and collectively, as a model clade in studies of morphological, ecological, and behavioral trait evolution. Knowledge …
Marek's disease (MD) is pathology of chickens characterized by paralysis, immumosuppression, and the rapid induction of T-cell lymphomas. MD is caused by an oncogenic alphaherpesvirus, Marek's Disease Virus (MDV). Currently, MD is controlled through vaccination with non-oncogeni…
This thesis describes a new disease encompassing infantile-onset movement disorder (including severe parkinsonism and nonambulation), mood disturbance, autonomic instability, and developmental delay that was identified in eight cousins of a consanguineous Bedouin family in Saudi…
Mixture between populations is an evolutionary process that shapes genetic variation. Intermixing between groups of distinct ancestries creates mosaics of chromosomal segments inherited from multiple ancestral populations. Studying populations of mixed ancestry (admixed populati…