The endocrine system is a complex network of glands and hormones that regulates many of the body's functions; including growth, development and maturation, as well as the way several organs operate. The prostate is an important target of hormones and its functional maturity and development are influenced by steroids levels. Our research group has been evaluating the potential effects of the ste...

Two new species of Cystocnemis (s. str.) Motschulsky, 1860 namely C. levmedvedevi sp. nov. and C. zintshenkoi sp. nov. are described from the Mongolian Altai (Mongolia, Hovd aimag) and Southern Altai (Kazakhstan, East-Kazakhstan region) respectively. Generic diagnosis as well as key to species and subspecies of Cystocnemis are provided. Zoogeographical affinities of Entomoscelini are discussed.

Tinnitus often occurs after exposure to loud noise. This raises the question of whether repeated exposure to noise increases the risk of developing tinnitus. We thus studied tinnitus development after repeated acoustic overstimulation using startle and auditory brainstem-response techniques applied to Mongolian gerbils. Noise with bandwidths ranging from 0.25 up to 0.5 oct were used for repeate...

Neurons in sensory pathways exhibit a vast multitude of adaptation behaviors, which are assumed to aid the encoding of temporal stimulus features and provide the basis for a population code in higher brain areas. Here we study the transition to a population code for auditory gap stimuli both in neurophysiological recordings and in a computational network model. Independent component analysis (I...

For many species, migration evolves to allow organisms to access better resources. However, the proximate factors that trigger these developmental changes, and how and why these vary across species, remain poorly understood. One prominent hypothesis is that poor-quality food promotes development of migratory phenotypes and this has been clearly shown for some polyphenic insects. In other animal...

Kazakh populations have traditionally lived as nomadic pastoralists that seasonally migrate across the steppe and surrounding mountain ranges in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia. To clarify their population history from a paternal perspective, we analyzed the non-recombining portion of the Y-chromosome from Kazakh populations living in southern Altai Republic, Russia, using a high-resolution ana...

In recent years, both the intraspecific and interspecific functional diversity (FD) of plant communities have been studied with new approaches to improve an understanding about the mechanisms underlying plant species coexistence. Yet, little is known about how global change drivers will impact intraspecific FD and trait overlap among species, and in particular how this may scale to impacts on c...

Eleven Y-chromosome STR loci (DYS19, DYS388, DYS389I, DYS389II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393, two DYS385 loci and DXYS156Y) were analyzed in 92 randomly chosen males from Mongolia. Allelic frequencies and gene diversity for each Y-STR locus and haplotype diversity were determined to evaluate their usefulness in forensic casework. A total of 84 different haplotypes were identified, among which...