scholarly journals Mainstreaming Caenorhabditis elegans in experimental evolution

2014 ◽  
Vol 281 (1778) ◽  
pp. 20133055 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy C. Gray ◽  
Asher D. Cutter
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Systems Biology ◽  
Caenorhabditis Elegans ◽  
Experimental Evolution ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Biological Knowledge ◽  
Experimental Systems ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Mating System Evolution

Experimental evolution provides a powerful manipulative tool for probing evolutionary process and mechanism. As this approach to hypothesis testing has taken purchase in biology, so too has the number of experimental systems that use it, each with its own unique strengths and weaknesses. The depth of biological knowledge about Caenorhabditis nematodes, combined with their laboratory tractability, positions them well for exploiting experimental evolution in animal systems to understand deep questions in evolution and ecology, as well as in molecular genetics and systems biology. To date, Caenorhabditis elegans and related species have proved themselves in experimental evolution studies of the process of mutation, host–pathogen coevolution, mating system evolution and life-history theory. Yet these organisms are not broadly recognized for their utility for evolution experiments and remain underexploited. Here, we outline this experimental evolution work undertaken so far in Caenorhabditis , detail simple methodological tricks that can be exploited and identify research areas that are ripe for future discovery.

The study of evolutionary parasitology

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-18
Author(s):  
Paul Schmid-Hempel
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Evolutionarily Stable Strategies ◽  
Basic Scheme ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
History Of ◽  
Evolutionarily Stable

An overview of the evolutionary process and the four basic questions that can be asked for biological phenomena. Furthermore, what biological units evolve, and the particular role of genes, is explained. Life history is introduced as a basic scheme that applies to individuals as well as to infections within a host. In particular, life history theory highlights the relevance of transmission as an equivalent to reproduction in the life history of individuals. The last section mentions several major methods for studying evolutionary parasitology; in particular, optimality approaches, the study of evolutionarily stable strategies, and comparative studies. Introducing the disease space as an illustrative tool for major topics in the book chapters.

Interrelationships of factors of social development are more complex than Life History Theory predicts

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris Kotchoubey
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Strong Correlations ◽  
Behavioral Features

Abstract Life History Theory (LHT) predicts a monotonous relationship between affluence and the rate of innovations and strong correlations within a cluster of behavioral features. Although both predictions can be true in specific cases, they are incorrect in general. Therefore, the author's explanations may be right, but they do not prove LHT and cannot be generalized to other apparently similar processes.

Nuklearmedizin trifft Strahlentherapie

2010 ◽  
Vol 49 (S 01) ◽  
pp. S11-S15
Author(s):  
C. Schütze ◽  
M. Krause ◽  
A. Yaromina ◽  
D. Zips ◽  
M. Baumann
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Medicine ◽  
Radiation Oncology ◽  
External Beam Radiotherapy ◽  
Biological Knowledge ◽  
Important Research ◽  
Tumour Control ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Normal Tissue Damage ◽  
Local Tumour Control ◽  
Local Tumour

SummaryRadiobiological and cell biological knowledge is increasingly used to further improve local tumour control or to reduce normal tissue damage after radiotherapy. Important research areas are evolving which need to be addressed jointly by nuclear medicine and radiation oncology. For this differences of the biological distribution of diagnostic and therapeutic nuclides compared with the more homogenous dose-distribution of external beam radiotherapy have to be taken into consideration. Examples for interdisciplinary biology-based cancer research in radiation oncology and nuclear medicine include bioimaging of radiobiological parameters characterizing radioresistance, bioimage-guided adaptive radiotherapy, and the combination of radiotherapy with molecular targeted drugs.

scholarly journals Five reasons COVID-19 is less severe in younger age groups

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul W Turke
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Life History Theory ◽  
Age Of Onset ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Medical Community ◽  
System Function ◽  
The Third ◽  
Immune System Function ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Younger Age

Abstract The severity of COVID-19 is age-related, with the advantage going to younger age groups. Five reasons are presented. The first two are well-known, are being actively researched by the broader medical community, and therefore are discussed only briefly here. The third, fourth, and fifth reasons derive from evolutionary life history theory, and potentially fill gaps in current understanding of why and how young and old age groups respond differently to infection with SARS-CoV-2. Age of onset of generalized somatic aging, and the timing of its progression, are identified as important causes of these disparities, as are specific antagonistic pleiotropic tradeoffs in immune system function.

scholarly journals Integrating ensemble systems biology feature selection and bimodal deep neural network for breast cancer prognosis prediction

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Li-Hsin Cheng ◽  
Te-Cheng Hsu ◽  
Che Lin
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Neural Network ◽  
Feature Selection ◽  
Systems Biology ◽  
Ensemble Learning ◽  
Microarray Data ◽  
Deep Neural Network ◽  
Prediction Models ◽  
Biological Knowledge ◽  
Prognosis Prediction

AbstractBreast cancer is a heterogeneous disease. To guide proper treatment decisions for each patient, robust prognostic biomarkers, which allow reliable prognosis prediction, are necessary. Gene feature selection based on microarray data is an approach to discover potential biomarkers systematically. However, standard pure-statistical feature selection approaches often fail to incorporate prior biological knowledge and select genes that lack biological insights. Besides, due to the high dimensionality and low sample size properties of microarray data, selecting robust gene features is an intrinsically challenging problem. We hence combined systems biology feature selection with ensemble learning in this study, aiming to select genes with biological insights and robust prognostic predictive power. Moreover, to capture breast cancer's complex molecular processes, we adopted a multi-gene approach to predict the prognosis status using deep learning classifiers. We found that all ensemble approaches could improve feature selection robustness, wherein the hybrid ensemble approach led to the most robust result. Among all prognosis prediction models, the bimodal deep neural network (DNN) achieved the highest test performance, further verified by survival analysis. In summary, this study demonstrated the potential of combining ensemble learning and bimodal DNN in guiding precision medicine.

scholarly journals Natural variation in fecundity is correlated with species-wide levels of divergence in Caenorhabditis elegans

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaotian Zhang ◽  
Jake D Mostad ◽  
Erik C Andersen
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Caenorhabditis Elegans ◽  
Life History Traits ◽  
Life History Trait ◽  
Selective Sweeps ◽  
C Elegans ◽  
Genome Wide ◽  
Genetic Complexity ◽  
Genomic Regions ◽  
Global Population

Abstract Life history traits underlie the fitness of organisms and are under strong natural selection. A new mutation that positively impacts a life history trait will likely increase in frequency and become fixed in a population (e.g. a selective sweep). The identification of the beneficial alleles that underlie selective sweeps provides insights into the mechanisms that occurred during the evolution of a species. In the global population of Caenorhabditis elegans, we previously identified selective sweeps that have drastically reduced chromosomal-scale genetic diversity in the species. Here, we measured the fecundity of 121 wild C. elegans strains, including many recently isolated divergent strains from the Hawaiian islands and found that strains with larger swept genomic regions have significantly higher fecundity than strains without evidence of the recent selective sweeps. We used genome-wide association (GWA) mapping to identify three quantitative trait loci (QTL) underlying the fecundity variation. Additionally, we mapped previous fecundity data from wild C. elegans strains and C. elegans recombinant inbred advanced intercross lines that were grown in various conditions and detected eight QTL using GWA and linkage mappings. These QTL show the genetic complexity of fecundity across this species. Moreover, the haplotype structure in each GWA QTL region revealed correlations with recent selective sweeps in the C. elegans population. North American and European strains had significantly higher fecundity than most strains from Hawaii, a hypothesized origin of the C. elegans species, suggesting that beneficial alleles that caused increased fecundity could underlie the selective sweeps during the worldwide expansion of C. elegans.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document