BACKGROUND In the present study we have investigated the cultural transmission of two types of traditional plant knowledge in two communities of North-western Patagonia, Argentina. In the Pilcaniyeu community, we studied the transmission of traditional knowledge related to horticultural practices in home-gardens, greenhouses and gardens; while in the community of Cuyin Manzano, we studied wild ...

Streptococcus mutans strains were isolated from cohorts of Brazilian nursery school children and genotyped by arbitrarily primed PCR and restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. Of 24 children with two to five S. mutans isolates, 29% carried two or more genotypes. The presence of matching genotypes of S. mutans among children attending one nursery suggests horizontal transmission.

The three relevant solutions of these equations are (i) (N T , N ∗ A) = (0, 0): this is the trivial case where both populations are zero. (ii) (N T , N ∗ A) = (K, 0): this solution describes a domain full with individuals that do not carry the trait; no trait-carrying individuals are present. (iii) (N T , N ∗ A) = (K,K − β/γ): this solution is the most interesting one for our purposes. It descr...

wolbachia is an intracellular endosymbiont, which can induce thelytokous parthenogenesis in trichogramma egg parasitoids with the infected females producing daughters without any mating. with regard to the usual transfer of wolbachia which is vertical from the mother to her offspring through the cytoplasm of eggs, this manipulation of host’s reproduction can enhance its transmission to future g...

In theory, plasmids can only be maintained in a population when the rate of horizontal gene transfer is larger than the combined effect of segregational loss and the decrease of fitness associated with plasmid carriage. Recent advances in genome sequencing have shown, however, that a large fraction of plasmids do not carry the genes necessary for conjugation or mobilization. So, how are so-call...

Phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) provide a potentially powerful toolkit for testing hypotheses about cultural evolution. Here, we build on previous simulation work to assess the effect horizontal transmission between cultures has on the ability of both phylogenetic and non-phylogenetic methods to make inferences about trait evolution. We found that the mode of horizontal transmission of ...

Parental effects are ubiquitous in nature and in many organisms play a particularly critical role in the transfer of symbionts across generations; however, their influence and relative importance in the marine environment has rarely been considered. Coral reefs are biologically diverse and productive marine ecosystems, whose success is framed by symbiosis between reef-building corals and unicel...

Amphibian populations worldwide are being threatened by the disease chytridiomycosis, which is caused by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis To mitigate the effects of B. dendrobatidis, bioaugmentation of antifungal bacteria has been shown to be a promising strategy. One way to implement bioaugmentation is through indirect horizontal transmission, defined as the transfer of bacteria from a host to t...