background: there has been increasing awareness throughout the world regarding the remarkable decrease in amphibian population. for such amphibian population decline several causes have been given. cadmium, a heavy metal is released both from natural sources (leaching of cadmium rich soils) and anthropogenic activities to the aquatic and terrestrial environments. this study evaluated the toxici...

One of the most challenging research tasks in the field of wireless sensor networks is controlling the power consumption of batteries and prolonging network lifetime. For sensor networks that consist of a large number of sensor nodes, research on bio-inspired self-organization methods has attracted attention due to the potential applicability of such methods. In this paper, we focus on the call...

Cells cope with temperature elevations, which cause protein misfolding, by expressing heat shock proteins (HSPs). This adaptive response is called the heat shock response (HSR), and it is regulated mainly by heat shock transcription factor (HSF). Among the four HSF family members in vertebrates, HSF1 is a master regulator of HSP expression during proteotoxic stress including heat shock in mamma...

Call rate suppression is a common short-term solution for avoiding acoustic interference in animals. It has been widely documented between and within frog species, but the effects of non-anuran calling on frog vocalizations are less well known. Heterospecific acoustic interference on the calling of male Oophaga pumilio (formerly Dendrobates pumilio) was studied in a lowland, wet tropical forest...

The field of phylogenetics is changing rapidly with the application of high-throughput sequencing to non-model organisms. Cost-effective use of this technology for phylogenetic studies, which often include a relatively small portion of the genome but several taxa, requires strategies for genome partitioning and sequencing multiple individuals in parallel. In this study we estimated a multilocus...

A half-trace retrieval algorithm based on an extended-ptychographical iterative engine is proposed to reconstruct the temporal structure of pulse from a polluted and recorded frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) trace that was modulated by poor spatial profile output pulses, stray light, or misalignment measurement setup. In algorithm, probe gated were retrieved simultaneously FROG with hal...

In this study, we determined the complete nucleotide sequence of the mitochondrial genome of the Japanese pond frog Rana nigromaculata. The length of the sequence of the frog was 17,804 bp, though this was not absolute due to length variation caused by differing numbers of repetitive units in the control regions of individual frogs. The gene content, base composition, and codon usage of the Jap...

Fourteen adult frogs including six banded frog, Rana camerani and eight marsh frog, Rana ridibunda ridibunda were collected from two sites of Chahar Mahal-o-Bakhtiari province at the southwest of Iran and then were examined for helminth parasites. Only Dolichosaccus rastellus  (50%) was found in R. camerani, Skrjabinoeces similis (50%) and metacercarian cysts of Codonocephalus urniger (12.5%) w...