Chicken mites (Dermanyssus gallinae) collected in several localities in St. Louis County have been fbund to be infected with the virus of St. Louis encephalitis (1, 2). The infection is probably permanent since congenital transfer of the virus in these mites has been demonstrated. Persistence of the virus in nature is indicated likewise by isolation of the virus from mites collected at a single...

Seasonally dry tropical plant formations (SDTF) are likely to exhibit phylogenetic clustering owing to niche conservatism driven by a strong environmental filter (water stress), but heterogeneous edaphic environments and life histories may result in heterogeneity in degree of phylogenetic clustering. We investigated phylogenetic patterns across ecological gradients related to water availability...

Varroa destructor (Anderson and Trueman) trapped on bottom boards were assessed as indirect measurements of colony mite population differences and potential indicators of mite resistance in commercial colonies of Russian and Italian honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) by using 35 candidate measurements. Measurements included numbers of damaged and nondamaged younger mites, nymphs, damaged and nondam...

Identification of homogeneous invariant geographical units assumes considerable importance in the context of current attempts at developing environmental indices to monitor changes. Data on the edaphic and climatic parameters for the state of Gujarat--a predominantly arid to semi-arid province in western India--has been used to elaborate an approach that employs principal component analysis (PC...

House dust mites are of immense importance to human beings because of their positive role in causing various kinds of allergenic manifestations such as: allergic rhinitis, asthma, dermatitis and conjunctivitis as reported from different regions of the globe including India. The study was carried out in August 2012 to September 2013. During this period 200 dust samples collected from the human d...

BACKGROUND Strong patterns of habitat association are frequent among tropical forest trees and contribute to the maintenance of biodiversity. The relation of edaphic differentiation to tradeoffs among leaf functional traits is less clear, but may provide insights into mechanisms of habitat partitioning in these species rich assemblages. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We quantify the leaf econ...

The analysis of the influence of edaphic finer textures, as a facilitating factor for the expansion of forest formations in the absence of fire, was possible thanks to rare characteristics found in a savanna fragment located in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. The total suppression of fire for over four decades, and the occurrence of two savanna physiognomies, cerrado sensu stricto and cerradão,...

BACKGROUND Studies on plant communities in the Amazon have reported that different hydro-edaphic conditions can affect the richness and the species composition of different ecosystems. However, this aspect is poorly known in the different savanna habitats. Understanding how populations and plant communities are distributed in these open vegetation areas is important to improve the knowledge abo...

The role of wildfires as the most significant source of disturbance in boreal forests has been equaled by clearcuts during the past five decades. Post-disturbance revegetation patterns are important because they have a direct influence on many ecological processes. However, the knowledge of post-disturbance changes in spatial patterns of forest cover is scarce, especially at large scales. We ex...

Miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) are predicted to play important roles on genome evolution. We developed a BLASTN-based approach for de novo identification of MITEs and systematically analyzed MITEs in rice genome. The genome of rice cultivar Nipponbare (Oryza sativa ssp. japonica) harbors 178,533 MITE-related sequences classified into 338 families. Pairwise nucleotide di...