The ART of brain expression

Abstract

When trying to find a mate, one might think about using a dating app. Imagine that someone else has installed the same app and tries to access the same potential mates that you have chosen, and that this someone uses false facts about himself/herself to increase the chance of dating someone before you or anyone else with honest status information does. Sounds familiar? It actually is, and in no way is such comportment restricted to human courtship behaviour. Alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs) are widespread in the animal kingdom. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Cardoso, Gonçalves, Goesmann, Canário, and Oliveira () investigate plastic ARTs of the peacock blenny (Salaria pavo), in which males occur in three morphs: nestholders, sneakers and transitionals between the two former. They apply transcriptome sequencing to answer the question how brain gene expression contributes to sex role-specific behaviour and to intersex phenotypes.

Editorial 2019

“…Microbial communities are clearly an emerging area of interest, with papers examining the genetic basis of host-fungal symbiont interactions, particularly relating to the evolution of host specialization (Gladieux, 2018), and the transcriptomics of biofilms (Veach & Griffiths, 2018). Other Perspectives discussed the predictability of evolutionary genetic changes (Linnen, 2018), the maintenance of diversity because of selection driven by sexual conflict (Meisel, 2018), the value of improved annotation of gene functions by analysing expression responses to environmental conditions (Stanford & Rogers, 2018), gene expression differences in brain tissue from females, territorial and sneaker male peacock blennies (Böhne, 2018) and the potential importance of crop-wild hybrids in weedy populations in maintaining important crop allelic diversity (Ellstrand, 2018).…”