The combination of biological and chemical approaches for the generation of new and diverse natural products holds much promise. While mutasynthesis based approaches are still very relevant, more ...recent approaches have utilised genetic and metabolic engineering to generate key intermediates for chemical syntheses. This new semi-synthetic approach exploits the ability of biological systems to efficiently generate complex chiral molecules and of synthetic chemistry to elaborate these into new, or difficult to source, molecules.
Abstract
Background
Parents’ reluctance to vaccinate their children undermines the effectiveness of vaccination programmes in Western Europe. There is anecdotal evidence suggesting a connection ...between the rise of political populism and vaccine hesitancy.
Methods
This paper analyses national-level data to examine the link between political populism and vaccine hesitancy in Western Europe. Political populism is operationalised as the percentage of people in a country who voted for populist parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections. Vaccine hesitancy is operationalised as the percentage of people in a country who believe that vaccines are not important, safe and effective according to data from the Vaccine Confidence Project (2015).
Results
There is a highly significant positive association between the percentage of people in a country who voted for populist parties and who believe that vaccines are not important (R = 0.7923, P = 0.007) and effective (R = 0.7222, P = 0.0035). The percentage of people who think vaccines are unsafe just misses being significant at the 5% level (R = 0.5027, P = 0.0669).
Conclusions
Vaccine hesitancy and political populism are driven by similar dynamics: a profound distrust in elites and experts. It is necessary for public health scholars and actors to work to build trust with parents that are reluctant to vaccinate their children, but there are limits to this strategy. The more general popular distrust of elites and experts which informs vaccine hesitancy will be difficult to resolve unless its underlying causes—the political disenfranchisement and economic marginalisation of large parts of the Western European population—are also addressed.
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•Dated phylogeny for babblers including 402 out of 452 currently recognized species.•Revealed the phylogenetic positions of some taxa previously not studied using newly generated ...sequences.•A new taxonomy for babblers with seven families and 64 genera, including one new family and one new genus.
The babblers are a diverse group of passerine birds comprising 452 species. The group was long regarded as a “scrap basket” in taxonomic classification schemes. Although several studies have assessed the phylogenetic relationships for subsets of babblers during the past two decades, a comprehensive phylogeny of this group has been lacking. In this study, we used five mitochondrial and seven nuclear loci to generate a dated phylogeny for babblers. This phylogeny includes 402 species (ca. 89% of the overall clade) from 75 genera (97%) and all five currently recognized families, providing a robust basis for taxonomic revision. Our phylogeny supports seven major clades and reveals several non-monophyletic genera. Divergence time estimates indicate that the seven major clades diverged around the same time (18–20 million years ago, Ma) in the early Miocene. We use the phylogeny in a consistent way to propose a new taxonomy, with seven families and 64 genera of babblers, and a new linear sequence of names.
Completing Wallace's journey Kennedy, Jonathan D; Fjeldså, Jon
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
01/2020, Letnik:
367, Številka:
6474
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A global inventory of species diversity is critical for understanding the evolution of life on Earth
British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace developed the theory of evolution as a consequence of the ...taxonomic discoveries made during his expeditions across the Indonesian archipelago in the 19th century. From his collections, thousands of new species have been described, including around 2% of all living bird species. Birds are one of the most comprehensively documented organismal groups, but multiple new species continue to be described yearly, and at an increasing rate. Nearly all recent avian species discoveries come from disjunct geographic locations. However, on page 167 of this issue, Rheindt
et al.
(
1
) describe five new species and five subspecies from three islands off the eastern coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. This is the largest number of new species descriptions from a restricted geographic locality in over a century and highlights the importance of documenting biodiversity today, given the environmental threats that could condemn many as yet unidentified taxa to extinction.
Aim: Understanding the evolution of the latitudinal diversity gradient (i.e. increase in species diversity towards the tropics) is a prominent issue in ecology and biogeography. Disentangling the ...relative contributions of environment and evolutionary history in shaping this gradient remains a major challenge because their relative importance has been found to vary across regions and taxa. Here, using the global distributions and a molecular phylogeny of Rhododendron, one of the largest genera of flowering plants, we aim to compare the relative contributions of contemporary environment, evolutionary time and diversification rates in generating extant species diversity patterns. Location: Global. Time period: Undefined. Major taxa studied: Rhododendron. Methods: We compiled the global distributions of all Rhododendron species, and constructed a dated molecular phylogeny using nine chloroplast genes and seven nuclear regions. By integrating these two datasets, we estimated the temporal trends of Rhododendron diversification, and explored the global patterns of its species diversity, net diversification rates, and species ages. Next, we reconstructed the geographical ancestral area of the clade. Finally, we compared the relative contribution of contemporary environment, time-for-speciation, and diversification rates on the species diversity pattern of Rhododendron. Results: In contrast to the predictions of the time-for-speciation hypothesis, we found that although Rhododendron originated at a temperate latitude, its contemporary species diversity is highest in the tropics/subtropics, suggesting an into-the-tropics colonization for this genus. We found that the elevated diversification induced by heterogeneous environmental conditions in the tropics/subtropics shapes the global pattern of Rhododendron diversity. Main conclusions: Our findings support tropical and subtropical mountains as not only biodiversity and endemism hotspots, but also as cradles for the diversification of Rhododendron. Our study emphasizes the need of unifying ecological and evolutionary approaches in order to gain comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms underlying the global patterns of plant diversity.
Ankylosing spondylitis is the second most common cause of inflammatory arthritis. However, a successful diagnosis can take a decade to confirm from symptom onset (via x-rays). The aim of this study ...was to use machine learning methods to develop a profile of the characteristics of people who are likely to be given a diagnosis of AS in future. The Secure Anonymised Information Linkage databank was used. Patients with ankylosing spondylitis were identified using their routine data and matched with controls who had no record of a diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis or axial spondyloarthritis. Data was analysed separately for men and women. The model was developed using feature/variable selection and principal component analysis to develop decision trees. The decision tree with the highest average F value was selected and validated with a test dataset. The model for men indicated that lower back pain, uveitis, and NSAID use under age 20 is associated with AS development. The model for women showed an older age of symptom presentation compared to men with back pain and multiple pain relief medications. The models showed good prediction (positive predictive value 70%-80%) in test data but in the general population where prevalence is very low (0.09% of the population in this dataset) the positive predictive value would be very low (0.33%-0.25%). Machine learning can be used to help profile and understand the characteristics of people who will develop AS, and in test datasets with artificially high prevalence, will perform well. However, when applied to a general population with low prevalence rates, such as that in primary care, the positive predictive value for even the best model would be 1.4%. Multiple models may be needed to narrow down the population over time to improve the predictive value and therefore reduce the time to diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis.
Natural history collections (NHCs) are the foundation of historical baselines for assessing anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Along these lines, the online mobilization of specimens via ...digitization—the conversion of specimen data into accessible digital content—has greatly expanded the use of NHC collections across a diversity of disciplines. We broaden the current vision of digitization (Digitization 1.0)—whereby specimens are digitized within NHCs—to include new approaches that rely on digitized products rather than the physical specimen (Digitization 2.0). Digitization 2.0 builds on the data, workflows, and infrastructure produced by Digitization 1.0 to create digital-only workflows that facilitate digitization, curation, and data links, thus returning value to physical specimens by creating new layers of annotation, empowering a global community, and developing automated approaches to advance biodiversity discovery and conservation. These efforts will transform large-scale biodiversity assessments to address fundamental questions including those pertaining to critical issues of global change.
Why diversification rates vary so extensively across the tree of life remains an important yet unresolved issue in biology. Two prominent and potentially independent factors proposed to explain these ...trends reflect the capacity of lineages to expand into new areas of (i) geographical or (ii) ecological space. Here, we present the first global assessment of how diversification rates vary as a consequence of geographical and ecological expansion, studying these trends among 15 speciose passerine families (together approximately 750 species) using phylogenetic path analysis. We find that relative slowdowns in diversification rates characterize families that have accumulated large numbers of co-occurring species (at the 1° scale) within restricted geographical areas. Conversely, more constant diversification through time is prevalent among families in which species show limited range overlap. Relative co-occurrence is itself also a strong predictor of ecological divergence (here approximated by morphological divergence among species); however, once the relationship between co-occurrence and diversification rates have been accounted for, increased ecological divergence is an additional explanatory factor accounting for why some lineages continue to diversify towards the present. We conclude that opportunities for prolonged diversification are predominantly determined by continued geographical range expansion and to a lesser degree by ecological divergence among lineages.
Aim
Variation in species diversity among different geographical areas may result from differences in speciation and extinction rates, immigration and time for diversification. An area with high ...species diversity may be the result of a high net diversification rate, multiple immigration events from adjacent regions, and a long time available for the accumulation of species (known as the ‘time‐for‐speciation effect’). Here, we examine the relative importance of the three aforementioned processes in shaping the geographical diversity patterns of a large radiation of passerine birds.
Location
Global.
Taxon
Babblers (Aves: Passeriformes).
Methods
Using a comprehensive phylogeny of extant species (~90% sampled) and distributions of the world's babblers, we reconstructed their biogeographical history and analysed the diversification dynamics. We examined how species richness correlates with the timing of regional colonization, the number of immigration events and the rate of speciation within all 13 geographical distribution regions.
Results
We found that babblers likely originated in the Sino‐Himalayan Mountains (SHM) in the early Miocene, suggesting a long time for diversification and species accumulation within the SHM. Regression analyses showed the regional diversity of babblers can be well explained by the timing of the first colonization within of these areas, while differences in rates of speciation or immigration have far weaker effects. Nonetheless, the rapid speciation of Zosterops during the Pleistocene has accounted for the increased diversification and accumulation of species in the oceanic islands.
Main Conclusions
Our results suggest that the global diversity patterns of babblers have predominantly been shaped by the time‐for‐speciation effect. Our findings also support an origin centred in tropical and subtropical parts of the SHM, with a cradle of recent diversification in the oceanic islands of the Indo‐Pacific and Indian Ocean regions, which provides new insights into the generation of global biodiversity hotspots.
Abstract
The rapid diversification and high species richness of flowering plants is regarded as ‘Darwin’s second abominable mystery’. Today the global spatiotemporal pattern of plant diversification ...remains elusive. Using a newly generated genus-level phylogeny and global distribution data for 14,244 flowering plant genera, we describe the diversification dynamics of angiosperms through space and time. Our analyses show that diversification rates increased throughout the early Cretaceous and then slightly decreased or remained mostly stable until the end of the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction event 66 million years ago. After that, diversification rates increased again towards the present. Younger genera with high diversification rates dominate temperate and dryland regions, whereas old genera with low diversification dominate the tropics. This leads to a negative correlation between spatial patterns of diversification and genus diversity. Our findings suggest that global changes since the Cenozoic shaped the patterns of flowering plant diversity and support an emerging consensus that diversification rates are higher outside the tropics.
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