Range shifts (especially during the Pleistocene), polyploidisation and hybridization are major factors affecting high-mountain biodiversity. A good system to study their role in the European high mountains is the Doronicum clusii aggregate (Asteraceae), whose four taxa (D. clusii s.s., D. stiriacum, D. glaciale subsp. glaciale and D. glaciale subsp. calcareum) are differentiated geographically,...

A recent circumpolar survey of chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) haplotypes identified Pleistocene glacial refugia for the Arctic-Alpine Saxifraga oppositifolia in the Arctic and, potentially, at more southern latitudes. However, evidence for glacial refugia within the ice sheet covering northern Europe during the last glacial period was not detected either with cpDNA or in another study of S. oppositifo...

Harboring a large number of endemic species, the Alps and the Western Carpathians are considered as major centers of biodiversity. Nonetheless, the general opinion until the turn of the millennium was that both Central European mountain regions did not provide suitable habitat during the Last Glacial Maximum, but were colonized later from southern refuges. However, recent molecular genetic stud...

MOTIVATION Small non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) play important roles in various cellular functions in all clades of life. With next-generation sequencing techniques, it has become possible to study ncRNAs in a high-throughput manner and by using specialized algorithms ncRNA classes such as miRNAs can be detected in deep sequencing data. Typically, such methods are targeted to a certain class of ncRNA...

The Effective Field Theory (EFT) Lagrangian for a generic axion-like particle (ALP) has many free parameters, and leaves quite some freedom the expected phenomenology. In this work, we set up more constrained EFTs by enforcing true properties ALP. Indeed, though Peccei-Quinn symmetry of QCD axion is anomalous, it so in specific ways, shows as consistency conditions between gauge boson fermion c...

A large-scale three-dimensional inversion of teleseismic P wave arrival times from ISC bulletins is performed over the part of Europe extending from Scandinavia to the Alps, and down to a depth of 700 km. The inferred velocity variations are compared with those obtained previously for North America in a similar study (Romanowicz 1979). The models obtained manage to explain one third of the stan...