It has been proposed that the Iberian Peninsula served as an important refuge for honey bees during periods of European glaciation. The discovery of genetic markers originating from both African and European honey bee lineages in extant Iberian populations led to hypotheses that the region may be a zone of hybridization or reflect the action of human-assisted translocations. In the present stud...

Zeuxine gracilis, Zeuxine strateumatica, and Eulophia sinensis are wild orchids with different breeding systems and colonizing abilities. Zeuxine gracilis is an outcrosser with restricted distribution, whereas S. strateumatica is an apomictic colonizer found only in newly available open habitats. Eulophia sinensis is an outcrossing colonizer. This study investigates the levels of genetic variat...

The morphologically similar Culex pipiens sensu lato and Cx. torrentium are sympatric in much of Central, Eastern and Northern Europe. Since morphological separation of females of these mosquitoes is extremely difficult and uncertain, diagnosis depends upon time consuming microscopic examination of male hypopygial characters. Consequently the possible, or even probable, occurrence of Cx. torren...

We have studied in Drosophila pseudoobscura the effect of allozyme variation on seven fitness components: female fecundity, egg hatchability, egg-toadult survival under near-optimal and under competitive conditions, rate of development under near-optimal and under competitive conditions, and mating capacity of males. Three genotypes at each of two loci, Pgm-1 and Me-2, have been studied in vari...

We explore the potential of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis, alone and in conjunction with allozymes, to study low-frequency hybridization and introgression phenomena in natural populations. MtDNAs from small samples of nine species of sunfish (Lepomis, Centrarchidae) were purified and digested with each of 13 informative restriction enzymes. Digestion profiles for all species were highly di...

Allozyme variation at the phosphoglucose isomerase (PGI) locus in the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia) is associated with variation in flight metabolic rate, dispersal rate, fecundity and local population growth rate. To map allozyme to DNA variation and to survey putative functional variation in genomic DNA, we cloned the coding sequence of Pgi and identified nonsynonymous vari...

The geographic distributions of mercury-tolerant allozyme genotypes of the enzyme phosphoglucomutase in the shrimp Palaemon elegans and the enzyme phosphoglucose isomerase in the marine gastropod Monodonta turbinata were compared in a mercury-polluted site versus several unpolluted sites on the Israeli coast of the Mediterranean sea. We conclude that in both phosphoglucomutase and phosphoglucos...