Morphometrics of eight Chinese cavefish species

Cavefish

What are cavefish? Like other cave-dwelling animals, fish that live in caves have often lost their eyes and body colour, but the evolutionary mechanisms underlying these reductions are unknown. There are 86 species of cavefish that belong to 18 different families, and many of them have lost their eyes independently. Comparing cavefish to their free-living ancestors can thus help us understand c...

Plant species identification using digital morphometrics: A review

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2012.01.073 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J.S. C (D. Corney), [email protected] (J.Y. Clark), (P. Remagnino), [email protected] (P. Wilkin). Plants are of fundamental importance to life on Earth. The shapes of leaves, petals and whole plants are of great significance to plant science, as ...

Hereditary Transthyretin Amyloidosis in Eight Chinese Families

BACKGROUND Mutations of transthyretin (TTR) cause the most common type of autosomal-dominant hereditary systemic amyloidosis, which occurs worldwide. To date, more and more mutations in the TTR gene have been reported. Some variations in the clinical presentation are often observed in patients with the same mutation or the patients in the same family. The purpose of this study was to find out t...

Harvesting in an Eight Species Ecosystem

Why cavefish are blind.

Some fish exist as eyed, surface-dwelling and eyeless, cave-dwelling forms. The developmental processes that cause eye degeneration in different populations of Astyanax cavefish are similar. Although small optic primordia start to form, apoptosis of lens cells triggers developmental arrest and degeneration of the eyes. Degeneration has been linked to reduced expression of the transcription fact...