If you imagine a scenario where an individual had unlimited resources, anything that required some investment wouldn’t be a big deal. It would be able to send some of these resources to achieve the required task and go on about its business without worrying about cutting costs elsewhere. When resources are limited, this changes…. Read more »
Posts Categorized: Paper
How gene expression can produce specificity
Different parasite strains (of the same species of parasite) are able to infect different individuals (of the same species of host). This is called specificity or can be called a genotype-by-genotype interaction. That is, that some genotypes of parasite are able to infect some genotypes of hosts. In insects, it’s hard to understand how… Read more »
What are the costs of and conditions for accelerated reproduction?
Animals have complex ways of dealing with infection. Most of these constitute the immune system, but animals can do other non-immune things to either protect themselves from getting infected, or to help cope with infection (reviewed here with Ben Parker and others). These adaptations might be particularly important for animals with a weak immune system,… Read more »
Why infection outcome varies, and why it matters.
Ben Sadd and I recently wrote a review about heterogeneity in infection outcomes. We were tasked with writing a review about the bumblebee-trypanosome system that we work on, but we wanted to expand the discussion a bit further than simply explaining the workings of our own system. We tried instead to use what is… Read more »
Franzi’s first paper is out!
Franziska Brünner was my first student here at the ETH and a paper from her semesterarbeit has been published in PLoS One. Franzi’s paper explores the expression of immune genes in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris when they are infected with the trypanosome gut parasite Crithidia bombi. Unlike most other papers looking at gene expression in bumblebees we used colonies that… Read more »