Environmental gradients and wastewater discharges produce aggregated effects on marine populations, obscuring the detection of human impact. Classical assessment methods do not include environmental effects in toxicity tests designs, which could lead to incorrect conclusions. We proposed a modified Whole Effluent Toxicity test (mWET) that includes environmental gradients in addition to effluent...

Infectious disease dynamics are determined, to a great extent, by the social structure of the host. We evaluated sociality, or the tendency to form groups, in Rocky Mountain mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus hemionus) from a chronic wasting disease (CWD) endemic area in Saskatchewan, Canada, to better understand factors that may affect disease transmission. Using group size data collected on 365 r...

There are various methods for detection of Helicobacter pylori and the gold standard for non-invasive detection is the urea breath test (UBT). The aim of the study is therefore to detect H. pylori from the stool of patients with dyspepsia by PCR and compare results obtained with UBT. A total of 97 stool samples from patients presenting with dyspeptic symptoms in Lagos University Teaching Hospit...

We studied the association between environmental stress and epidermal papillomatosis of roach Rutilus rutilus L. in Finnish waters using a 'matched pairs' design. Populations impacted by industrial and/or sewage effluents were compared to reference populations from pristine sites. We examined both the prevalence (proportion of diseased fish) and intensity (number of scales covered by tumors) of...

Helicobacter pylori infection occurs within families but the transmission route is unknown. The use of stool specimens to genotype strains facilitates inclusion of complete families in transmission studies. Therefore, we aimed to use DNA from stools to analyze strain diversity in H. pylori infected families. We genotyped H. pylori strains using specific biprobe qPCR analysis of glmM, recA and h...

The evolution of traits involved in ecological interactions such as predator-prey, host-parasite, and plant-pollinator interactions, are likely to be shaped by the phylogenetic history of both parties. We develop generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMM) that estimate the effect of both parties' phylogenetic history on trait evolution, both in isolation but also in terms of how the two his...

BACKGROUND Many neurological diseases are accompanied by an increase in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) protein concentration, which indicates dysfunction of the blood-CSF/blood-brain barrier. However, the significance CSF protein concentration of patients with cryptococcal meningitis (CM) is not fully understood. The aim of the present was to determine whether CSF protein concentrations correlat...