According to the Host-tracking Hypothesis, species of higher trophic levels with a close relationship to their hosts, such as parasites or parasitoids, are expected to show spatio-temporal phylogeographic patterns similar to those of their host. Alternatively, with ecological sorting, a subset of the local species pools might shift to a related host species, thereby disengaging common phylogeog...

BACKGROUND Black spot is one of the most severe and damaging diseases of garden roses. We present the draft genome sequence of its causative agent Diplocarpon rosae as a working tool to generate molecular markers and to analyze functional and structural characteristics of this fungus. RESULTS The isolate DortE4 was sequenced with 191x coverage of different read types which were assembled into...

Diplolepis (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae) are gall wasps that induce conspicuous galls on Rosa spp. (Rosaceae). These species distributed globally and in Europe some especially common founder organisms of biological communities composed different insects. However, the ecological niches these have not been studied detail. We modelled potential distributions using locations four most abundant Iberian P...

Both predators and parasitoids can have significant effects on species' life history traits, such as longevity or clutch size. In the case of gall inducers, sporadically there is evidence to suggest that both vertebrate predation and insect parasitoid attack may shape the optimal gall size. While the effects of parasitoids have been studied in detail, the influence of vertebrate predation is le...

Doing experiments is the most creative, and often the most exciting, aspect of a life in biology. But not everyone who enjoys science takes naturally to doing experiments. Like most things, it takes practice. I had to do five years of research before I really understood and got to like experiments, and a colleague told me that as a student he hated the smell of Escherichia coli so much that he ...