Estimates of global species diversity have varied widely, primarily based on variation in the numbers derived from different inventory methods of arthropods and other small invertebrates. Within vertebrates, current diversity metrics for fishes, amphibians, and reptiles are known to be poor estimators, whereas those for birds and mammals are often assumed to be relatively well established. We s...

Citation: Atterby C, Mourkas E, Méric G, Pascoe B, Wang H, Waldenström J, Sheppard SK, Olsen B, Järhult JD and Ellström P (2018) The Potential of Isolation Source to Predict Colonization in Avian Hosts: A Case Study in Campylobacter jejuni Strains From Three Bird Species. Front. Microbiol. 9:591. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.00591 The Potential of Isolation Source to Predict Colonization in Avian Ho...

Cytochrome P450 (CYP) of chicken and other avian species have been studied primarily with microsomes or characterized by cloning and protein expression. However, the overall existing isoforms in avian CYP1-3 families or dominant isoforms in avian xenobiotic metabolism have not yet been elucidated. In this study, we aimed to clarify and classify all of the existing isoforms of CYP1-3 in avian sp...

Pandemic influenza remains a serious public health threat and the processes involved in the evolutionary emergence of pandemic influenza strains remain incompletely understood. Here, we develop a stochastic model for the evolutionary emergence of pandemic influenza, and use it to address three main questions. (i) What is the minimum annual number of avian influenza virus infections required in ...

Many palaeobiological analyses have concluded that modern birds (Neornithes) radiated no earlier than the Maastrichtian, whereas molecular clock studies have argued for a much earlier origination. Here, we assess the quality of the fossil record of Mesozoic avian species, using a recently proposed character completeness metric which calculates the percentage of phylogenetic characters that can ...