biodiversity/biological diversity Species, genetic, and ecosystem diversity in an area, sometimes including associated abiotic components such as landscape features, drainage systems, and climate. diversity indices Measures that describe the different components of biodiversity, such as species richness (alpha diversity), beta and gamma diversity, endemicity, and higher taxon richness. ecosyste...

Functional diversity is increasingly pointed as a useful approach to reach Biological Conservation goals. Here, we provide an overview of the functional diversity approach status in the Biological Conservation field. We sought for peer-reviewed papers published over a period of twenty years (from 1994 to 2014). First we used the general topic "functional diversity" and then refined our search u...

BACKGROUND 'Diversity' is often cited as a crucial consideration when generating compound collections for biological screening. However, what exactly does one mean by 'diversity' and why is it important? OBJECTIVE How can diversity be incorporated into compound collections and what are the theoretical and technical challenges this poses? In this editorial, we comment on various factors involv...

impacts of effluent from fish farming activities on fluvial ecosystems lead to deterioration of water quality and changes in the macroinvertebrates assemblage. in this study, the influence of fish farm effluents on water quality and macroinvertebrates communities of tajan river was investigated to evaluate the suitability of macroinvertebrates based on biological metrics and indices. benthic ma...

Pathogens have evolved diverse strategies to maximize their transmission fitness. Here we investigate these strategies for directly transmitted pathogens using mathematical models of disease pathogenesis and transmission, modeling fitness as a function of within- and between-host pathogen dynamics. The within-host model includes realistic constraints on pathogen replication via resource depleti...

Biological diversity in areas of land use (called ‘agrodiversity’ in the People, Land Management and Environmental Change – PLEC project) is not simply a function of the diversity of species and varieties of biota. Naturally, it does concern standard ecological biodiversity aspects (often termed ‘agro-biodiversity’ or ‘agricultural biodiversity’). Usually it is used to tell the tale of how mode...

B-cell antigen receptor (BCR) or antibody diversity arises from somatic recombination of immunoglobulin (Ig) gene segments and is concentrated within the Ig heavy (H) chain complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR-H3). We performed high-throughput sequencing of the expressed antibody heavy-chain repertoire from adult torafugu. We found that torafugu use between 70 and 82% of all possible V (va...