Written by a group of world-renowned virologists, this book reviews all of the most recent advances in rhabdovirology, providing an overiew of the field.

This volume in the "Tertiary Level Biology" series fills a gap in the taxonomic literature by providing a comprehensive survey of the arguments and techniques of systematics as they are applied today to all groups of organisms. It covers the principles of nomenclature and classification, the logic and practice of cladistics, and, in a series of chapters, considers the scope, application, benefits and drawbacks of a wide range of sources of phylogenetically informative character systems, from behaviour and morphology to DNA. There is an emphasis on modern aspects of the subject. This book should be of interest to taxonomists, biochemists and evolutionary biologists at advanced undergraduate and immediate postgraduate levels.

Myriapods are the only major zoological group for which a modern encyclopedic treatment has never been produced. In particular, this was the single major gap in the largest zoological treatise of the XIX century (Grass s Trait de Zoologie), whose publication has recently been stopped. The two volumes of The Myriapoda fill that gap with an updated treatment in the English language. Volume I opens with an introductory treatment of myriapod affinities and phylogeny. The following chapters are mostly devoted to the Chilopoda or centipedes, extensively treated from the point of view of external and internal morphology, physiology, reproduction, development, distribution, ecology, phylogeny and taxonomy. All currently recognized suprageneric and generic taxa are considered. Additional chapters deal with the two smaller myriapod classes, the Symphyla and the Pauropoda. Volume II deals with the Diplopoda or millipedes. As in the previous volume, the treatment is articulated in chapters dealing with external and internal morphology, physiology, reproduction, development, distribution, ecology, phylogeny and taxonomy. All currently recognized suprageneric taxa and a very large selection of the genera are considered. All groups and features are extensively illustrated by line drawings and micrographs and living specimens of representative species of the main groups are presented in color photographs

This timely text presents a comprehensive guide to genetic association, a new and rapidly expanding field that aims to elucidate how our genetic code (genotypes) influences the traits we possess (phenotypes). The book provides a detailed review of methods of gene mapping used in association with experimental crosses, as well as genome-wide association studies. Emphasis is placed on model selection procedures for analyzing data from large-scale genome scans based on specifically designed modifications of the Bayesian information criterion. Features: presents a thorough introduction to the theoretical background to studies of genetic association (both genetic and statistical); reviews the latest advances in the field; illustrates the properties of methods for mapping quantitative trait loci using computer simulations and the analysis of real data; discusses open challenges; includes an extensive statistical appendix as a reference for those who are not totally familiar with the fundamentals of statistics.

The Frit Flies (Chloropidae, Diptera) of Fennoscandia and Denmark is written by two leading experts on this large and difficult group of small to minute flies, Dr Emilia P. Nartshuk, Zoological Institute Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia, & Dr Hugo Andersson (deceased in 2008), Zoological Institute, Lund University, Sweden. The book covers the North European fauna of frit flies that totals 209 species in 48 genera including 11 species and 1 genus described as new to science. Several species are economically important as notorial pests of cereals and fodder grasses. This is the first comprehensive treatment ever of the entire North European fauna of frit flies. It primarily facilitates species identification, but further summarizes existing knowledge about nomenclature, biology, faunistics and literature. Keys are given to subfamilies, genera and species for the adults and for the known larvae to genus or even species level. The text is supplemented with numerous illustrations of characters of diagnostic importance. Species distributions in the Nordic countries are detailed in a catalogue.

The protein molecule is the basic building block of every living entity. Its deficiency leads to restricted growth and development of individuals. Globally, such malnutrition is on the rise due to various reasons such as rapid population growth, stagnation of productivity, and ever-rising costs. Millions of people, especially in developing and under-developed countries, suffer from protein malnutrition and the only possible solution is to encourage farmers to grow high-protein food legume crops in their fields for domestic consumption. This, however, could be possible if farmers are provided with new cultivars with high yield, and resistance to major insects, diseases, and key abiotic stresses. The major food legume crops are chickpea, cowpea, common bean, groundnut, lentil, pigeonpea, and soybean. Predominantly, the legume crops are grown under a subsistence level and, therefore, in comparison to cereals and horticultural crops their productivity is low and highly variable. The crop breeders around the globe are engaged in breeding suitable cultivars for harsh and changing environments but success has been limited and not up to needs. With the recent development of new technologies in plant sciences, efforts are being made to help under-privileged farmers through breeding new cultivars which will produce more protein per unit of land area. In this book, the contributors analyze the constraints, review new technologies, and propose a future course of crop breeding programs in seven cold and warm season legume crops.

Transcriptome Profiling: Progress and Prospects assists readers in assessing and interpreting a large number of genes, up to and including an entire genome. It provides key insights into the latest tools and techniques used in transcriptomics and its relevant topics which can reveal a global snapshot of the complete RNA component of a cell at a given time. This snapshot, in turn, enables the distinction between different cell types, different disease states, and different time points during development. Transcriptome analysis has been a key area of biological inquiry for decades. The next-generation sequencing technologies have revolutionized transcriptomics by providing opportunities for multidimensional examinations of cellular transcriptomes in which high-throughput expression data are obtained at a single-base resolution. Transcriptome analysis has evolved from the detection of single RNA molecules to large-scale gene expression profiling and genome annotation initiatives. Written by a team of global experts, key topics in Transcriptome Profiling include transcriptome characterization, expression analysis of transcripts, transcriptome and gene regulation, transcriptome profiling and human health, medicinal plants transcriptomics, transcriptomics and genetic engineering, transcriptomics in agriculture, and phylotranscriptomics.

Mechanisms and Deployment of Resistance in Trees to Insects is a worldwide synthesis of tree resistance to insects. The contributions are by senior scientists and represent all the major forested regions of the world. The book constitutes a comprehensive treatment of the state of our knowledge on patterns of resistance by insect guilds and how this knowledge can be deployed to achieve the management of damaging forest insects. This book will serve as an essential reference book for all researchers and practitioners attempting to manage forest pests using genetic resistance.

Natural resources and associated biological diversity provide the basis of livelihood for human population, particularly in the rural areas and mountain regions across the globe. Asia is home to the world's highest mountain regions including the Himalayas, Karakorum and Hindukush. These regions are renowned around the globe because of their unique beauty, climate, and biocultural diversity. Because of geoclimatic conditions, the mountains of Asia are medicinal and food plant diversity hot spots. The indigenous communities residing in the valleys of these mountains have their own culture and traditions, and have a long history of interaction with the surrounding plant diversity. Local inhabitants of these mountains areas possess significant traditional knowledge of plant species used as food, medicine, and for cultural purposes. So far, many workers have reported traditional uses of plant species from different regions of Asia including some mountain areas; however, there is not one inclusive document on the ethnobotany of mountains in Asia. This book provides a comprehensive overview on ethno-ecological knowledge and cross cultural variation in the application of plant species among various communities residing in the mountains of Asia; cross cultural variation in traditional uses of plant species by the mountain communities; high value medicinal and food plant species; and threats and conservation status of plant species and traditional knowledge. This book should be useful to researchers of biodiversity and conservation, ethnobiologists, ethnoecologists, naturalists, phytochemists, pharmacists, policy makers, and all who have a devotion to nature.

This fully updated edition explores conceptual as well as technical guidelines for plant taxonomists and geneticists, such as the increasing use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies for numerous applications in plant taxonomy. The volume provides molecular approaches to be used within an "integrative taxonomy" framework, combining a range of nucleic acid and cytogenetic data together with other crucial information (taxonomy, morphology, anatomy, ecology, reproductive biology, biogeography, paleobotany, etc.), which will help not only to best circumvent species delimitation but also to resolve the evolutionary processes in play. Written for the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and up-to-date, Molecular Plant Taxonomy: Methods and Protocols, Second Edition is an ideal guide for researchers seeking a better understanding of evolutionary processes, at species and population level, through molecular techniques.

This book provides a conceptually organized framework to understand the phenomenon of biological invasions at the Anthropocene global scale. Most advances toward that aim have been provided from North American and European researchers, with fewer contributions from Australia and South Africa. Here we fill the void from the Neotropics, focusing on the research experience in South American countries, with a strong emphasis on Argentina and Chile. The text is divided into two parts: The first half comprises self-contained chapters, providing a conceptual, bibliographic and empirical foundation in the field of invasion biology, from an Anthropocene perspective. The second half reviews the ecology, biogeography, and local impacts in South America of exotic species groups (European rabbit, Eurasian wild boar, Canadian beaver, North American mink, and Holarctic freshwater fishes), which are shown to be useful models for case studies of global relevance.

Codon-based models of evolution are a relatively new addition to the toolkit of computational biologists, and in recent years remarkable progress has been made in this area. The study of evolution at the codon level captures information contained in both amino acid and synonymous DNA substitutions. By combining these two types of information, codon analyses are more powerful than those of either amino acid or DNA evolution alone. This is a clear benefit for most evolutionary analyses, including phylogenetic reconstruction, detection of selection, ancestral sequence reconstruction, and alignment of coding DNA. Despite the theoretical advantages of codon based models, their relative complexity delayed their widespread use. Only in recent years, when large-scale sequencing projects produced sufficient genomic data and computational power increased, did their usage become more common. In Codon Evolution, leading researchers in the field of molecular evolution provide the latest insights from codon-based analyses of genetic sequences. The first part of the book provides comprehensive coverage of the developments of various types of codon substitution models such as parametric and empirical models used in maximum likelihood as well as Bayesian frameworks. Subsequent chapters examine the use of codon models to infer selection and other applications of codon models to biological systems. The second part of the book focuses on codon usage bias. Both the underlying mechanisms as well as current methods to analyse codon usage bias are presented.

The aim of this book is to offer information about the Pharmacological Properties of Native Plants from Argentina to students, researchers and graduates interested in the fields of Ethnobotany, Pharmacognosy, Phytochemistry, Pharmacy, and Medicine. The book includes summary information about the native plants from Argentina with medical activity comprising their botanical characteristics, distribution, characteristics of the regions where they grow, ethnobotanical information, chemical data, biological activity, establishment of in vitro cultures, toxicity, and legal status.

Animal Evolution provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolutionary interrelationships and myriad diversity of the Animal Kingdom. It reviews the classical, morphological information from structure and embryology, as well as the new data gained from studies using immune stainings of nerves and muscles and blastomere markings which makes it possible to follow the fate of single blastomeres all the way to early organogenesis. Until recently, the information from analyses of gene sequences has tended to produce myriads of quite diverging trees. However, the latest generation of molecular methods, using many genes, expressed sequence tags, and even whole genomes, has brought a new stability to the field. For the first time this book brings together the information from these varied fields, and demonstrates that it is indeed now possible to build a phylogenetic tree from a combination of both morphology and gene sequences. This thoroughly revised third edition of Animal Evolution brings the subject fully up to date, especially in light of the latest advances in molecular techniques. The book is generously illustrated throughout with finely detailed line drawings and clear diagrams, many of them new.

Plant Systematics, Third Edition, has made substantial contributions to plant systematics courses at the upper-undergraduate and first year graduate level, with the first edition winning The New York Botanical Garden's Henry Allan Gleason Award for outstanding recent publication in plant taxonomy, plant ecology or plant geography. This third edition continues to provide the basis for teaching an introduction to the morphology, evolution and classification of land plants. A foundation of the approach, methods, research goals, evidence and terminology of plant systematics are presented, along with the most recent knowledge of evolutionary relationships of plants and practical information vital to the field. In this new edition, the author includes greatly expanded treatments on families of flowering plants, as well as tropical trees (all with full-color plates), and an updated explanation of maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference algorithms. Chapters on morphology and plant nomenclature have also been enhanced with new material.

Animal life, now and over the past half billion years, is incredibly diverse. Describing and understanding the evolution of this diversity of body plans - from vertebrates such as humans and fish to the numerous invertebrate groups including sponges, insects, molluscs, and the many groups of worms - is a major goal of evolutionary biology. In this book, a group of leading researchers adopt a modern, integrated approach to describe how current molecular genetic techniques and disciplines as diverse as palaeontology, embryology, and genomics have been combined, resulting in a dramatic renaissance in the study of animal evolution.
The last decade has seen growing interest in evolutionary biology fuelled by a wealth of data from molecular biology. Modern phylogenies integrating evidence from molecules, embryological data, and morphology of living and fossil taxa provide a wide consensus of the major branching patterns of the tree of life; moreover, the links between phenotype and genotype are increasingly well understood. This has resulted in a reliable tree of relationships that has been widely accepted and has spawned numerous new and exciting questions that require a reassessment of the origins and radiation of animal life. The focus of this volume is at the level of major animal groups, the morphological innovations that define them, and the mechanisms of change to their embryology that have resulted in their evolution. Current research themes and future prospects are highlighted including phylogeny reconstruction, comparative developmental biology, the value of different sources of data and the importance of fossils, homology assessment, character evolution, phylogeny of major groups of animals, and genome evolution. These topics are integrated in the light of a 'new animal phylogeny', to provide fresh insights into the patterns and processes of animal evolution.
Animal Evolution provides a timely and comprehensive statement of progress in the field for academic researchers requiring an authoritative, balanced and up-to-date overview of the topic. It is also intended for both upper level undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in animal evolution, molecular phylogenetics, evo-devo, comparative genomics and associated disciplines.

Animal phylogeny is undergoing a major revolution due to the availability of an exponentially increasing amount of molecular data and the application of novel methods of phylogentic reconstruction, as well as the many spectacular advances in palaeontology and molecular developmental biology. Traditional views of the relationships among major phyla have been shaken and new, often unexpected, relationships are now being considered. At the same tiem, the emerging discipline of evolutionary developmental biology, or 'evo-devo', has offered new insights into the origin and evolvability of major traits of animal architecture and life cycle. All these developments call for a revised interpretation of the pathways along which animal structure and development has evolved since the origin of the Metazoa.
Perspectives in Animal Phylogeny and Evolution takes on this challenge, successfully integrating morphological, fossil and molecular evidence to produce a novel reinterpretation of animal evolution. Central to the book's approach is an 'evo-devo' perspective on animal evolution (with all the fresh insights this has given into the origin of animal organization and life cycles), complementary to the more traditional perspectives of pattern (cladistics, comparative anatomy and embryology), mechanisms (developmental biology) and adaptation (evolutionary biology). The author advocates the need to approach the study of animal evolution with a critical attitude towards many key concepts of comparative morphology and developmental biology. Particular attention in the book is paid to the evolution of life cycles and larval forms.
This accessible text is suitable for graduate students takingadvanced courses in evolutionary developmental biology, invertebrate zoology, molecular phylogenetics and palaeontology, as well as professional researchers in these fields requiring an authoritative and up-to-date overview of this dynamic topic.

Microbes are ubiquitous in nature. Among microbes, fungal communities play an important role in agriculture, the environment, and medicine. Vast fungal diversity has been associated with plant systems, namely epiphytic fungi, endophytic fungi, and rhizospheric fungi. These fungi associated with plant systems play an important role in plant growth, crop yield, and soil health. Rhizospheric fungi, present in rhizospheric zones, get their nutrients from root exudates released by plant root systems, which help with their growth, development, and microbe activity. Endophytic fungi typically enter plant hosts through naturally occurring wounds that are the result of plant growth, through root hairs, or at epidermal conjunctions. Phyllospheric fungi may survive or proliferate on leaves depending on material influences in leaf diffuseness or exudates. The diverse nature of these fungal communities is a key component of soil-plant systems, where they are engaged in a network of interactions endophytically, phyllospherically, as well as in the rhizosphere, and thus have emerged as a promising tool for sustainable agriculture. These fungal communities promote plant growth directly and indirectly by using plant growth promoting (PGP) attributes. These PGP fungi can be used as biofertilizers and biocontrol agents in place of chemical fertilizers and pesticides for a more eco-friendly method of promoting sustainable agriculture and environments. This first volume of a two-volume set covers the biodiversity of plant-associated fungal communities and their role in plant growth promotion, the mitigation of abiotic stress, and soil fertility for sustainable agriculture. This book should be useful to those working in the biological sciences, especially for microbiologists, microbial biotechnologists, biochemists, and researchers and scientists of fungal biotechnology.

Systematics has developed rapidly during the past two decades. A multitude of new methods and contributions from a diversity of biological fields including molecular genetics and developmental biology have provided a wealth of phylogenetic hypotheses, some confirming traditional views others contradicting them. Despite such inconsistencies, it is now possible to recognize robust regions of a 'tree of life' and also to identify problematic areas which have yet to be resolved. This is the first book to apply the current state of phylogeny to an evolutionary interpretation of animal organ systems and body architecture, providing alternative theories in those cases of continuing controversy.
Organs do not appear suddenly during evolution; instead they are composed of far simpler structures. In some cases it is even possible to trace particular molecules or physiological pathways as far back as pre-animal history. What emerges is a fascinating picture, showing how animals have combined ancestral and new elements in novel ways to form constantly changing responses to environmental requirements.
The Evolution of Organ Systems starts with a general overview of current animal phylogeny, followed by review of general body organization including symmetry, anteroposterior axis, dorsoventral axis, germ layers, segmentation, and skeletons. Subsequent chapters then provide a detailed description of the individual organ systems themselves - integument, musculature, nervous system, sensory organs, body cavities, excretory system, circulatory system, respiratory system, intestinal system, gonads and gametes. Generously illustrated throughout, this accessible text is suitable for both upper levelundergraduate and graduate students taking courses in animal evolution, organogenesis, animal anatomy, zoology and systematics. It will also be a valuable reference tool for those professional researchers in these fields requiring an authoritative, balanced and up-to-date overview of the topic.

Ancestral sequence reconstruction is a technique of growing importance in molecular evolutionary biology and comparative genomics. As a powerful tool for testing evolutionary and ecological hypotheses, as well as uncovering the link between sequence and molecular phenotype, there are potential applications in a range of fields. Ancestral Sequence Reconstruction starts with a historical overview of the field, before discussing the potential applications in drug discovery and the pharmaceutical industry. This is followed by a section on computational methodology, which provides a detailed discussion of the available methods for reconstructing ancestral sequences (including their advantages, disadvantages, and potential pitfalls). Purely computational applications of the technique are then covered, including whole proteome reconstruction. Further chapters provide a detailed discussion on taking computationally reconstructed sequences and synthesizing them in the laboratory. The book concludes with a description of the scientific questions where experimental ancestral sequence reconstruction has been utilized to provide insights and inform future research. This research level text provides a first synthesis of the theories, methodologies and applications associated with ancestral sequence recognition, while simultaneously addressing many of the hot topics in the field. It will be of interest and use to both graduate students and researchers in the fields of molecular biology, molecular evolution, and evolutionary bioinformatics.

Over-two thirds of the U.S. population is allergic to poison oak, poison ivy, or a related plant. These and many other common plants in our homes, fields, and gardens are irritants that cause misery to many. But surprisingly, there has never been a general guide to help raise awareness of them--and to help avoid them. This new book reviews the history, occurrence, classification, toxicity, and health aspects of all the major allergenic and irritant species.

This volume describes and illustrates the microscopic anatomy of the "aroids", the large, economically important plant family Araceae, and also the basal monocot family Acoraceae.