The liver is the central metabolic organ and exhibits fundamental functions in haematological traits. Hepatic expression, haematological, plasma biochemical, and body composition traits were assessed in a porcine model (n = 297) to establish tissue-specific genetic variations that influence the function of immune-metabolism-correlated expression networks. At FDR (false discovery rate) <1%, more...

BACKGROUND The posteromedial cortex (PMC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are part of a network of brain regions that has been found to exhibit decreased activity during goal-oriented tasks. This network is thought to support a baseline of brain activity, and is commonly referred to as the "default network". Although recent reports suggest that the PMC and mPFC are associated with affective...

To study the evolution of several quantitative traits, the classical phylogenetic comparative framework consists of a multivariate random process running along the branches of a phylogenetic tree. The Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process is sometimes preferred to the simple Brownian Motion (BM) as it models stabilizing selection toward an optimum. The optimum for each trait is likely to be changing ...

Religions promote moral rules of behavior and religiosity is associated with some types of moral intuitions, but there is no ultimate-level explanation for this association. Religiosity has recently been used as an indicator of a multivariate measure of slow Life History (LH) strategy. In this study, we predicted that LH strategy relates to increased strength of moral intuitions as measured by ...

When organisms are faced with new or changing environments, a central challenge is the coordination of adaptive shifts in many different phenotypic traits. Relationships among traits may facilitate or constrain evolutionary responses to selection, depending on whether the direction of selection is aligned or opposed to the pattern of trait correlations. Attempts to predict evolutionary potentia...

The current theories of animal personality are based on the observation that individual variation in behavior and physiology appears to be consistent across contexts. Rats of the Roman selection lines have been originally selected for differences in shuttle-box behavior. Besides differences in active avoidance, these animals differ more generally in coping style. Roman high avoidance (RHA) rats...

Early-life environments have profound influence on shaping the adult phenotype. Specifically, stressful rearing environments can have long-term consequences on adult physiology, neural functioning, and cognitive ability. While there is extensive biomedical literature regarding developmental stress, recent research in songbirds highlights similar findings in domesticated and non-domesticated spe...

Leaf hydraulic conductance (K leaf) is a major determinant of photosynthetic rate in plants. Previous work has assessed the relationships between leaf morpho-anatomical traits and K leaf with woody species, but there has been very little focus on cereal crops. The genus Oryza, which includes rice (Oryza sativa) and wild species (such as O. rufipogon cv. Griff), is ideal material for identifying...

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 ...