Under different environmental conditions, hybridization between the same species might result in different patterns of genetic admixture. Particularly, species pairs with large distribution ranges and long evolutionary history may have experienced several independent hybridization events over time in different zones of overlap. In birds, the diverse hybrid populations of the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) and the Spanish sparrow (Passer hispaniolensis) provide a striking example. Throughout their range of sympatry, these two species do not regularly interbreed; however, a stabilized hybrid form (Passer italiae) exists on the Italian Peninsula and on several Mediterranean islands. The spatial distribution pattern on the Eurasian continent strongly contrasts the situation in North Africa, where house sparrows and Spanish sparrows occur in close vicinity of phenotypically intermediate populations across a broad mosaic hybrid zone. In this study, we investigate patterns of divergence and admixture among the two parental species, stabilized and nonstabilized hybrid populations in Italy and Algeria based on a mitochondrial marker, a sex chromosomal marker, and 12 microsatellite loci. In Algeria, despite strong spatial and temporal separation of urban early‐breeding house sparrows and hybrids and rural late‐breeding Spanish sparrows, we found strong genetic admixture of mitochondrial and nuclear markers across all study populations and phenotypes. That pattern of admixture in the North African hybrid zone is strikingly different from i) the Iberian area of sympatry where we observed only weak asymmetrical introgression of Spanish sparrow nuclear alleles into local house sparrow populations and ii) the very homogenous Italian sparrow population where the mitogenome of one parent (P. domesticus) and the Z‐chromosomal marker of the other parent (P. hispaniolensis) are fixed. The North African sparrow hybrids provide a further example of enhanced hybridization along with recent urbanization and anthropogenic land‐use changes in a mosaic landscape.
SummaryThe Hkakabo Razi region located in northern Myanmar is an Important Bird Area and part of the Eastern Himalayan Biodiversity Hotspot. Within the framework of the World Heritage Convention to enlist the site under criterion (ix) and (x), we conducted a biodiversity assessment for passerine birds using DNA barcoding and other molecular markers. Of the 441 bird species recorded, we chose 16 target species for a comparative phylogeographic study. Genetic analysis was performed for a larger number of species and helped identifying misidentified species. We found phylogeographic structure in all but one of the 16 study species. In 13 species, populations from northern Myanmar were genetically distinctive and local mitochondrial lineages differed from those found in adjacent regions by 3.9–9.9% uncorrected genetic distances (cytochrome-b). Since the genetic distinctiveness of study populations will be corroborated by further differences in morphology and song as in other South-East Asian passerines, many of them will be candidates for taxonomic splits, or in case an older taxon name is not available, for the scientific description of new taxa. Considering the short time frame of our study we predict that a great part of undetected faunal diversity in the Hkakabo Razi region will be discovered.
Phylogeographic patterns of many Holarctic terrestrial vertebrate species are considered a legacy of Pleistocene range fragmentation and divergence of genetic lineages in glacial refuges (Hewitt, 2000,
In proteomics, fast, efficient and highly reproducible sample
preparation is of utmost importance, particularly in view of fast
scanning mass spectrometers enabling analyses of large sample series. To
address this need, we have developed the web application MassSpecPreppy
that operates on the open science OT-2 liquid handling robot from
Opentrons. This platform can prepare up to 96 samples at once,
performing tasks like BCA protein concentration determination, sample
digestion with normalization, reduction/alkylation and peptide elution
into vials or loading specified peptide amounts onto Evotips in an
automated and flexible manner. The performance of the developed
workflows using MassSpecPreppy was compared with standard manual sample
preparation workflows. The BCA assay experiments revealed an average
recovery of 101.3% (SD: ±7.82%) for the MassSpecPreppy workflow, while
the manual workflow had a recovery of 96.3% (SD: ±9.73%). The species
mix used in the evaluation experiments showed that 94.5% of protein
groups for OT-2 digestion and 95% for manual digestion passed the
significance thresholds with comparable peptide level coefficient of
variations. These results demonstrate that MassSpecPreppy is a versatile
and scalable platform for automated sample preparation, producing
injection-ready samples for proteomics research.
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