1. One of the main challenges faced by ecologists today is to understand and predict how species interactions will respond current environmental change. It likely that these changes have a stronger effect on phylogenetic lineages depend intimate specialised ecological interactions, such as most herbivorous insects. 2. In this review, we highlight aspects consider are fundamental for understandi...

Title of dissertation: GENETIC AND PHENOTYPIC DIFFERENTIATION AS A CONSEQUENCE OF HOST PLANT USE BY LEPIDOPTERAN HERBIVORES J. Gwen Shlichta, Doctor in Philosophy, 2011 Dissertation directed by: Professor Pedro Barbosa, Department of Entomology In this dissertation, I focused on the role of plant hosts as a driving force leading to phenotypic and genotypic changes in insect herbivores. There ar...

Endophytes, which mostly include bacteria, fungi and actinomycetes, are the endosymbionts that reside asymptomatically in plants for at least a part of their life cycle. They have emerged as a valuable source of novel metabolites, industrially important enzymes and as stress relievers of host plant, but still many aspects of endophytic biology are unknown. Functions of individual endophytes are...

Geminiviruses (Geminiviridae) are a diverse group of plant viruses differing from other known plant viruses in possessing circular, single-stranded DNA. Current classification divides the family into three subgroups, defined in part by genome organization, insect vector, and plant host range. Previous phylogenetic assessments of geminiviruses have used DNA and/or amino acid sequences from the r...

The effect of biodiversity on the ability of parasites to infect their host and cause disease (i.e. disease risk) is a major question in pathology, which is central to understand the emergence of infectious diseases, and to develop strategies for their management. Two hypotheses, which can be considered as extremes of a continuum, relate biodiversity to disease risk: One states that biodiversit...