Biodiversity concerns and the sustainability of agroecological systems, together with consumer demand for higher quality products from alternative extensive farming methods, have reinforced interest in local breeds that are well adapted to low-input environments. The first reference Portuguese poultry appeared 1930s, registration breeding programs native only being implemented last ten years. c...

A second enzyme that removes acetyl groups from lysine residues in E. coli been discovered and represents the founding member of a new enzyme family.

Predicting how marine mammal populations respond to habitat changes will be essential for developing conservation management strategies in the 21st century. Responses to previous environmental change may be informative in the development of predictive models. Here we describe the likely effects of the last ice age on grey seal population size and distribution. We use satellite telemetry data to...

Coffee farms are often embedded within a mosaic of agriculture and forest fragments in the world's most biologically diverse tropical regions. Although shade coffee farms can potentially support native pollinator communities, the degree to which these pollinators facilitate gene flow for native trees is unknown. We examined the role of native bees as vectors of gene flow for a reproductively sp...

Control of invasions is facilitated by their early detection, but this may be difficult when invasions are cryptic due to similarity between invaders and native species. Domesticated conspecifics offer an interesting example of cryptic invasions because they have the ability to hybridize with their native counterparts, and can thus facilitate the introgression of maladaptive genes. We assessed ...

Indigenous (native) breeds of livestock have higher disease resistance and adaptation to the environment due to high genetic diversity. Even though their extinction rate is accelerated due to the increase of commercial breeds, natural disaster, and civil war, there is a lack of well-established databases for the native breeds. Thus, we constructed the native pig and chicken breed database (NPCD...

the objective of this study was to determine the relationship between body weight (bw) and heart girth (hg) in sardi and timahdite sheep in order to develop a prediction equation of bw from hg. the data used for this study included 476 records on bw and hg (227 in sardi and 249 in timahdite) collected on males and females of different ages in 33 private farms. the bw and the hg averaged 34.8 ± ...

In this study parasitic infection of bobwhite and Japanese quails were clarified in farms of Garmsar city in province of Semnan. Forty quails from two breeds randomly were selected and they examined to identify all internal and external parasites .Finding was shown that five percent of the quails examined harbored one or more species of helminthes. Two cestodes, Raillietina echinobothrida and R...