Allergic diseases have great impact on the quality of life of both people and domestic animals. They are increasing in prevalence in both animals and humans, possibly due to the changed lifestyle conditions and the decreased exposure to beneficial microorganisms. Dogs, in particular, suffer from environmental skin allergies and develop a clinical presentation which is very similar to the one of...

Dairy propionibacteria are used as cheese ripening starters, as biopreservative and as beneficial additives, in the food industry. The main species, Propionibacterium freudenreichii, is known as GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe, USA, FDA). In addition to another dairy species, Propionibacterium acidipropionici, they are included in QPS (Qualified Presumption of Safety) list. Additional to the...

Horizontal transfer (HT) plays a major role in bacterial evolution, providing a way for bacteria to take advantage of beneficial mutations found by other bacteria, possibly from other species. Within a given species, horizontal transfers allow bacteria to evade the clonal interference phenomenon (Hill and Robertson, 1966) through allelic recombination: when two different beneficial mutations ar...

Recent data from Drosophila suggest that a substantial fraction of amino acid substitutions observed between species are beneficial. If these beneficial mutations are on average partially recessive, then the rate of protein evolution is predicted to be faster for X-linked genes compared to autosomal genes (the "faster-X" hypothesis). We test this prediction by comparing rates of protein substit...

While the soil environment is generally acknowledged as playing a role in plant competition, the relative importance of soil resources and soil microbes in determining outcomes of competition between native and exotic plants has rarely been tested. Resilience of plant communities to invasion by exotic species may depend on the extent to which native and exotic plant performance are mediated by ...

In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out a comparative study of an interacting particle system and its mean-field approximation. For a wide range of parameter values, we show both analytically and n...

background: to differentiate sarcocystis macro-cyst-forming species in slaughtered sheep in babol area, mazandaran province, sequence analysis of 18s rrna gene was performed. methods: overall, 150 slaughtered sheep were examined macroscopically in slaughterhouse, babol and intra-abdominal and diaphragm muscles tissues infected with macro-cyst of sarcocystis spp. were collected in 2013. one macr...