Eksperimenter i laboratoriet i kombinasjon med datamodellering åpner for nye gjennombrudd innen både hjerneforskning og kunstig intelligens.

An international, peer-reviewed genome sciences journal featuring outstanding original research that offers novel insights into the biology of all organisms

Reindeer is an iconic species in the Arctic and subarctic but populations are declining. An environmental quality standard for reindeer populations assess their overall status (poor, medium, and good...

How do you solve science’s toughest puzzles? By joining forces. Sixty-six research teams, bringing together 239 scientists, will receive a total of €684 million in European Research Council Synergy Gr...

Four UiO researchers across three projects have been awarded ERC Synergy Grants from the European Research Council (ERC). They will study snow in extreme environments, the use of AI to create syntheti...

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Scientific Reports - Zooplankton mortality and distribution around a seismic survey

Contraception has traditionally been used on domesticated and captive animals, but it has also found increasing application in locally overabundant wildlife species. Different immunocontraceptives are...

Walruses have been an important subsistence and cultural resource for humans and have been exploited for millennia across their distribution. This exploitation has contributed to severe declines in s...

Vi inviterer til folkeforskningskveld om Oslofjorden. Etter fjorårets suksess, får vi besøk av forskere fra UiO og andre institusjoner, som deler sine funn. Målet er å samarbeide om hvordan vi kan for...

Coagulation factor IX (FIX) contributes to hemostasis through both plasma activity and binding to extravascular collagen IV. Here, the authors show that collagen binding of albumin-fused hyperactive F...

Protists comprise the vast majority of eukaryotic genetic and functional diversity. While they have traditionally been difficult to study due to their…

Abstract. Metabarcoding has emerged as a robust method for assessing biodiversity patterns by retrieving environmental DNA directly from ecosystems. While

Background Whole-genome sequencing efforts, have during the past decade, unveiled the central role of genomic rearrangements—such as chromosomal inversions—in evolutionary processes, including local a...

PhD candidate Jeanne Gaspar Corrales at the Department of Biosciences will give a trial lecture called 'From Bench to Bedside: Organ-on-a-Chip Innovations in Antifungal Drug Development' as part of th...

In the last three decades, DNA sequencing of ancient animal osteological assemblages has become an important tool complementing standard archaeozoological approaches to reconstruct the history of ani...

The ability to predict ancient DNA sequencing success in natural history collections is critical to reducing the amount of destructive sampling of a finite resource. So far, studies investigating suc....

Inga Angelica Frøland Steindal has been accepted as a new member of The Young Academy of Norway. Inga is a researcher at the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) at the Department o...

Abstract. The Arctic has been the scene for (re)colonization, diversification, and adaptation of boreal and Arctic fauna. As anthropogenic warming of the A

Background While ants are textbook examples of eusocial animals in which altruistic behavior is maintained through kin selection, several ants form genetically diverse colonies that challenge this concept. One example is the Australian green-head ant (Rhytidoponera metallica) whose colonies harbor such extreme genetic variation that they have been speculated to represent an unstable form of eusociality. Yet, R. metallica is among the most successful ants on the Australian subcontinent. This success has been hypothesized to be partly due to the diverse venoms harbored within each colony. However, the genomic basis and evolutionary scenarios that maintain this toxin diversity remain unknown. Results To examine toxin genomic architecture, quantify individual-level genetic variation, and identify both proximate and ultimate mechanisms that have facilitated the toxin diversity in R. metallica, we generate a high-quality draft genome from a single worker. Most ectatotoxin genes are in clusters that contain evidence of multiple, complex gene-family expansions, some of which are likely explained by the presence of transposable elements. We also show that toxin regions of the genome exhibit elevated genetic variation despite being under strong selection and that this variation can translate to phenotypic diversity through toxin alleles with different functional properties. Conclusions Taken together, our results point to classical gene duplication and diversification as the main evolutionary mechanism by which the main toxin family in ant venoms evolves, suggest toxin-gene functional diversification under frequency-dependent selection maintains colony-level venom hypervariability in R. metallica, and provide new insight into the role of multi-level selection in eusocial animals.

Skogens konge har liten krone sammenliknet med det regaliet den irske kjempehjorten bar.

The Arctic tundra biome is undergoing rapid shrub expansion (‘shrubification’) in response to anthropogenic climate change. During the previous ~2.6 million years, glacial cycles caused substantial s...

With climate change, many species alter their distribution according to local climate velocities. For marine fish, suitable areas for spawning in a warming climate may be less favorable for the result...