habit and pollen morphology were studied in four taxa belonging to astragalus sect. macrophyllium in iran. data obtained from pollen morphology support the phenetic grouping based on habit morphology. in addition, meiotic chromosome number and behavior were analyzed in two species of the section. the species were cytogenetically analyzed and found to be tetraploid and possess a 2n = 4x = 32 chr...

A new species of Sphaerodactylus (Squamata: Gekkota: Sphaerodactylidae) is described from an amber inclusion from the late Early Miocene or early Middle Miocene (15 to 20 million years ago) of the Dominican Republic. Unlike earlier amber-embedded specimens assigned to this genus, the new specimen is largely skeletal, with some integument remaining. A combination of 258 (of 674) osteological and...

Analysis of restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) profiles derived from digestion of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) products of the ribosomal 18S from Trypanosoma cruzi yields a typical 'riboprint' profile that can vary intraspecifically. A selection of 21 stocks of T. cruzi and three outgroup taxa: T. rangeli, T. conorhini and Leishmania braziliensis were analysed by riboprinting to...

Triatoma infestans is the most important Chagas disease vector in South America. Two main evolutionary lineages, named Andean and non-Andean, have been recognized by geographical distribution, phenetic and genetic characteristics. One of the main differences is the genomic size, varying over 30% in their haploid DNA content. Here we realize a genome wide analysis to compare the repetitive genom...

Wheatears of the genus Oenanthe are birds specialized to desert ecosystems in the Palaearctic region from Morocco to China. Although they have been the subject of many morphological and ecological studies, no molecular data have been used to elucidate their phylogenetic relationships, and, their relationships are still debated. Here we use DNA sequences of 1180 bp of two mitochondrial genes, 16...

The present work had as objective to verify the genetic diversity among strains of Trypanosoma cruzi isolated in chronic chagasic patients in the Paraná state. Fifty patients with compatible clinical symptoms were selected (cardiopathy, megacolon and/or megaesophagus) and that presented positive serological reaction to T. cruzi. Six strains of the protozoan were isolated in hemoculture and iden...