during a faunal survey on the family tachinidae in fars province, six tachinid parasitoids belonging to the subfamilies tachininae and phasiinae were collected and identified. they are reported for the first time from iran. the species are as follows: linnaemya neavei curran, microcerophina planifacies kugler, phasia mesnili (draber-monko), catharosia flavicornis (zetterstedt), leucostoma enged...

In North America, cerambycid beetles can have significant ecological and economic effects on forest ecosystems, and the rate of introduction and/or detection of exotic species is increasing. Detection and survey programs rely on semiochemical-baited intercept traps which are often ineffective for large woodborers like cerambycid beetles. This study examined the effects of flight intercept trap ...

I compared the C(4) grass flora and climatic records for 32 sites in the United States. Consistent with previous studies, I found that the proportion of the grass flora that uses the NADP malic enzyme (NADP-ME) variant of C(4) photosynthesis greatly increases with increasing annual precipitation, while the proportion using the NAD malic enzyme (NAD-ME) variant (and also the less common phosphoe...

Tyrosine kinases are important components of metazoan signaling pathways, and their mutant forms are implicated in various malignancies. Searching the sequences from the genomes of 28 eukaryotes and the GenBank, we found tyrosine kinases not only in metazoans but also in the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, the potato late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans, and the protozoan pathogen...

Major intrinsic proteins (MIPs) facilitate the passive transport of small polar molecules across membranes. MIPs constitute a very old family of proteins and different forms have been found in all kinds of living organisms, including bacteria, fungi, animals, and plants. In the genomic sequence of Arabidopsis, we have identified 35 different MIP-encoding genes. Based on sequence similarity, the...

We studied the evolution of the tobacco Tnt1 retrotransposon by analyzing Tnt1 partial sequences containing both coding domains and U3 regulatory sequences obtained from a number of Nicotiana species. We detected three different subfamilies of Tnt1 elements, Tnt1A, Tnt1B, and Tnt1C, that differ completely in their U3 regions but share conserved flanking coding and LTR regions. U3 divergence bet...

Phylogenetic relationships between 32 species of rodents representing 14 subfamilies of Muridae and four subfamilies of Dipodidae were studied using sequences of the nuclear protein-coding genes Lecithin Cholesterol Acyl Transferase (LCAT) and von Willebrand Factor (vWF). An examination of some evolutionary properties of each data matrix indicates that the two genes are rather complementary, wi...

F-box proteins (FBPs) represent one of the largest and fastest evolving gene/protein families in the plant kingdom. The FBP superfamily can be divided in several subfamilies characterized by different C-terminal protein-protein interaction domains that recruit targets for proteasomal degradation. Hence, a clear picture of their phylogeny and molecular evolution is of special interest for the ge...