Determining the most likely source of an invasive pest species might help to improve their management by establishing efficient quarantine measures and heading the search of efficient biological control agents. Planococcus ficus is an invasive mealybug pest of vineyards in Argentina, California, Mexico, Peru and South Africa. This mealybug pest had a previously known geographic distribution spa...

in Nicaragua in 2006 and 2008. The bootstrap support for this grouping was 100%. Phylogenetic analyses with neighbor-joining, maximumparsimony, and Bayesian methods gave trees with similar topologies, including clear separation of most recent Central American isolates into 1 clade, as well as grouping of the Key West sequence with the same 2 isolates from Nicaragua (data not shown). No protein ...

Assembling a comprehensive catalog of all transcription factors (TFs) and the genes that they regulate (regulon) is important for understanding gene regulation. The sequence-specific conserved binding profiles of TFs can be characterized from whole genome sequences with phylogenetic approaches, and a large number of such profiles have been released. Effective mining of these data sources could ...

Genes encoding elongation factor-like (EFL) proteins, which show high similarity to elongation factor-1alpha (EF-1alpha), have been found in phylogenetically distantly related eukaryotes. The sporadic distribution of "EFL-containing" lineages within "EF-1alpha-containing" lineages indirectly, but strongly, suggests lateral gene transfer as the principal driving force in EFL evolution. However, ...

Recently, several new lipid-dependent species belonging to the genus Malassezia have been described. Some of them, such as Malassezia dermatis, Malassezia nana, and the tentatively named "Malassezia equi," have similar phenotypes and are genetically close to Malassezia sympodialis Simmons et Gueho 1990. DNA characterization by D1/D2 26S rRNA gene and internal transcribed spacer (ITS)-5.8S rRNA ...

Socio-ecological models aim to predict the variation in social systems based on a limited number of ecological parameters. Since the 1960s, the original model has taken two paths: one relating to grouping patterns and mating systems and one relating to grouping patterns and female social structure. Here, we review the basic ideas specifically with regard to non-human primates, present new resul...

MOTIVATION Through the most extensive phylogenomic analysis carried out to date, complete genomes of 11 eukaryotic species have been examined in order to find the homologous of more than 25,000 amino acid sequences. These sequences correspond to the exons of more than 3000 genes and were used as presence/absence characters to test one of the most controversial hypotheses concerning animal evolu...

In the post-genome era, insufficient functional annotation of predicted genes greatly restricts the potential of mining genome data. We demonstrate that an evolutionary approach, which is independent of functional annotation, has great potential as a tool for genome analysis. We chose the genome of a model filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa as an example. Phylogenetic distribution of each pre...

Arranging organisms into functional groups aids ecological research by grouping organisms (irrespective of phylogenetic origin) that interact with environmental factors in similar ways. Planktonic protists traditionally have been split between photoautotrophic "phytoplankton" and phagotrophic "microzooplankton". However, there is a growing recognition of the importance of mixotrophy in euphotic...

Planktic foraminifera have traditionally been classified within a single order: Globigerinida. However, recent phylogenetic studies, both molecular and stratophenetic, are evidencing the polyphyletic origin of planktic from several benthic ancestors. At least four independent events benthic-planktic transition identified. One them occurred after Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary mass extincti...