Project description:We analyzed the synchronous relationship between forest cover and species distribution to explain the contraction in the distribution range of the brown eared-pheasant (Crossoptilon mantchuricum) in China. Historical resources can provide effective records for reconstructing long-term distribution dynamics. The brown eared-pheasant's historical distribution from 25 to 1947 CE, which included the three provinces of Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Hebei based on this species' habitat selection criteria, the history of the forests, ancient climate change records, and fossil data. The current species distribution covers Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Hebei provinces, as well as Beijing city, while Shanxi remains the center of the distribution area. MaxEnt model indicated that the suitable conditions of the brown eared-pheasant had retreated to the western regions of Shanxi and that the historical distribution area had reduced synchronously with the disappearance of local forest cover in Shanxi. We built a correlative relationship between the presence/absence of brown eared-pheasants and forest coverage and found that forest coverage in the north, northeast, central, and southeast areas of the Shanxi province were all less than 10% in 1911. Wild brown eared-pheasants are stable in the Luliang Mountains, where forest coverage reached 13.2% in 2000. Consequently, we concluded that the distribution of this species is primarily determined by vegetation conditions and that forest cover was the most significant determining factor.
Project description:Spotty wrasses (Notolabrus celidotus) undergo socially cued female-to-male sex change as adults. We combine captive social manipulations and time-series sampling with transcriptomic and methylome approaches to describe the molecular cascade that orchestrates gonadal metamorphosis. Our findings reveal at a molecular level how a normally committed developmental process remains plastic and is reversed to completely alter organ structures.
Project description:Bone collagen is an important organic material for isotopic measurement, radiocarbon and paleoproteomic analyzes, to provide information on diet, dating, taxonomic identification. Current paleoproteomics methods are destructive and require from a few milligrams to several tenths of milligrams of bone for analysis. In many cultures, bones are raw materials for artefact which are conserved in museum which hampers to damage these precious objects during sampling. Here, we describe a minimal sampling method that identifies collagen, taxonomy and post-translational modifications from Holocene and Upper Pleistocene bones dated to 130,000 and 5,000 years ago using dermatological skin tape-discs for sampling. The sampled bone micro-powder were digested following our highly optimized eFASP protocol, then analyzed by MALDI FTICR MS and LC-MS/MS for identifying the genus taxa of the bones. We show that this low-invasive sampling does not deteriorate the bones and achieves results similar to those obtained by destructive sampling. Moreover, this sampling method can be performed at archaeological sites or in museums.
