Biology subjects

Dane, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Dane, M..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2020

Centennial clonal stability of asexual Daphnia in Greenland lakes despite climate variability

Climate and environmental condition drive biodiversity at many levels of biological organisation, from populations to ecosystems. Combined with palaeoecological reconstructions, palaeogenetic information on resident populations provides novel insights into evolutionary trajectories and genetic diversity driven by environmental variability. While temporal observations of changing genetic structure are often made of sexual populations, little is known about how environmental change affects the long-term fate of asexual lineages. Here, we provide information on obligately asexual, triploid Daphnia populations from three Arctic lakes in West Greenland through the past 200-300 years to test the impact of a changing environment on the temporal and spatial population genetic structure. The contrasting ecological state of the lakes, specifically regarding salinity and habitat structure may explain the observed lake-specific clonal composition over time. Palaeolimnological reconstructions show considerable environmental fluctuations since 1700 (the end of the Little Ice Age), but the population genetic structure in two lakes was almost unchanged with at most two clones per time period. Their local populations were strongly dominated by a single clone that has persisted for 250-300 years. We discuss three possible explanations for the apparent population genetic stability: (1) the persistent clones are general purpose genotypes that thrive under broad environmental conditions, (2) clonal lineages evolved subtle genotypic differences that are unresolved by microsatellite markers, or (3) epigenetic modifications allow for clonal adaptation to changing environmental conditions. Our results will motivate research into the mechanisms of adaptation in these populations, as well as their evolutionary fate in the light of accelerating climate change in the polar regions.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Invasion of homogeneous and polyploid populations in nutrient-limiting environments

Breast cancer progresses in a multistep process from primary tumor growth and stroma invasion to metastasis. Progression is accompanied by a switch to an invasive cell phenotype. Nutrient-limiting environments promote chemotaxis with aggressive morphologies characteristic of invasion. It is unknown how co-existing cells differ in their response to nutrient limitations and how this impacts invasion of the metapopulation as a whole. We integrate mathematical modeling with microenvironmental perturbation-data to investigate invasion in nutrient-limiting environments inhabited by one or two cancer cell subpopulations. Hereby, subpopulations are defined by their energy efficiency and chemotactic ability. We estimate the invasion-distance traveled by a homogeneous population. For heterogeneous populations, our results suggest that an imbalance between nutrient efficacy and chemotactic superiority accelerates invasion. Such imbalance will spatially segregate the two populations and only one type will dominate at the invasion front. Only if these two phenotypes are balanced do the two subpopulations compete for the same space, which decelerates invasion. We investigate ploidy as a candidate biomarker of this phenotypic heterogeneity to discern circumstances when inhibiting chemotaxis amplifies internal competition and decelerates tumor progression, from circumstances that render clinical consequences of chemotactic inhibition unfavorable.Significance A better understanding of the nature of the double-edged sword of high ploidy is a prerequisite to personalize combination-therapies with cytotoxic drugs and inhibitors of signal transduction pathways such as MTOR-Is.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.View Full Text

systems biology↗