Parental care in northern flickers: sex-related patterns of foraging, provisioning, and habitat use

The sexes have different life histories that can influence their parental care strategies. I studied northern flicker, Colaptes auratus, parents and simultaneously radio-tracked mates during the nestling and post-fledging periods. I tested hypotheses about sex differences in parental care strategies by examining foraging patterns, provisioning effort and habitat use. Males and females used the same microhabitats, but avoided overlap of their foraging areas on the home range consistent with the hypothesis that mates separate the home range to reduce competition. During temporary (i.e., 24 hr) brood size manipulations, both parents decreased provisioning to reduced broods, but did not increase provisioning to enlarged broods or alter their foraging pattern on the landscape. I suggest flickers were energy limited and were incapable or unwilling to respond to increased brood demands. During the post-fledging period, males spent more time near their fledglings, and cared for their fledglings longer than females (16 days versus 12 days, respectively). Approximately 36% of females abandoned their brood in the post-fledging period and females with high levels of feather corticosterone were more likely to abandon. Older males and those with high provisioning rates in the nestling period fed their fledglings longer. Nearly 45% of fledglings died within the first week after leaving the nest, but survival was higher for fledglings with intermediate body mass and those that occupied areas of dense cover. Families moved a greater distance from the nest during the first 4 days post-fledging when there was less tree cover within 250 m of the nest site. Parents brought fledglings to areas with dense vegetation within the first week post-fledging, but subsequently shifted to open grassland habitats. My results show that parents invest in their offspring indirectly by taking them to habitats that increase survival. This research stresses the importance of studying parental care during the post-fledging period to gain a more complete understanding of the total parental investment of males versus females and how each sex may react differently to trade-offs between investing in the current brood versus self-maintenance

New Clox Systems for rapid and efficient gene disruption in Candida albicans

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Janet Quinn, Lila Kastora, Joanna Potrykus, Michelle Leach, and others for sharing their experiences with the Clox cassettes. We thank Julia Kohler for her kind gift of the NAT1-flipper plasmid pJK863, Claudia Jacob for her advice with In-fusion cloning, and our colleagues in the Aberdeen Fungal Group for numerous stimulating discussions. Data Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. The sequences of all Clox cassettes are available in GenBank: URA3-Clox (loxP-URA3-MET3p-cre-loxP): GenBank accession number KC999858. NAT1-Clox (loxP-NAT1-MET3p-cre-loxP): GenBank accession number KC999859. LAL (loxP-ARG4-loxP): GenBank accession number DQ015897. LHL (loxP-HIS1-loxP): GenBank accession number DQ015898. LUL (loxP-URA3-loxP): GenBank accession number DQ015899. Funding: This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (www.wellcome.ac.uk): S.S., F.C.O., N.A.R.G., A.J.P.B. (080088); N.A.R.G., A.J.P.B. (097377). The authors also received support from the European Research Council [http://erc.europa.eu/]: DSC. ERB, AJPB (STRIFE Advanced Grant; C-2009-AdG-249793). The European Commission also provided funding [http://ec.europa.eu/research/fp7]: I.B., A.J.P.B. (FINSysB MC-ITN; PITN-GA-2008-214004). Also the UK Biotechnology and Biological Research Council provided support [www.bbsrc.ac.uk]: N.A.R.G., A.J.P.B. (Research Grant; BB/F00513X/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Testing predictions of inclusive fitness theory in inbreeding relatives with biparental care

Data accessibility Data are deposited in Dryad https:doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1zcrdfnf. R code supporting this article has been uploaded as part of the electronic supplementary material. Acknowledgements We thank the Tsawout and Tseycum First Nation bands for allowing access to Mandarte, numerous field assistants, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who contributed to long-term data collection, and Brad Duthie for insightful discussions regarding underlying concepts. National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (P.A., E.A.G); Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Fund for Advanced Studies (E.A.G, J.M.R.), UK Natural Environment Research Council (R.J.S.) and the European Research Council (J.M.R.) provided funding.Peer reviewedPostprin

Variation in parent-offspring kinship in socially monogamous systems with extra-pair reproduction and inbreeding

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank the Tsawout and Tseycum First Nations bands for allowing access to Mandarte; everyone who contributed to long-term data collection; Lukas Keller and Ryan Germain for helpful discussions; and the European Research Council, UK Royal Society, National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Swiss National Science Foundation for their invaluable support. DATA ARCHIVING Data are available from the Dryad Digital Repository: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4r383.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Candida albicans Hypha Formation and Mannan Masking of β-Glucan Inhibit Macrophage Phagosome Maturation

Received 28 August 2014 Accepted 28 October 2014 Published 2 December 2014 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank Janet Willment, Aberdeen Fungal Group, University of Aberdeen, for kindly providing the soluble Dectin-1-Fc reporter. All microscopy was performed with the assistance of the University of Aberdeen Core Microscopy & Histology Facility, and we thank the IFCC for their assistance with flow cytometry. We thank the Wellcome Trust for funding (080088, 086827, 075470, 099215, 097377, and 101873). E.R.B. and A.J.P.B. are funded by the European Research Council (ERC-2009-AdG-249793), and J.L. is funded by a Medical Research Council Clinical Training Fellowship.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

New \u3ci\u3eClox\u3c/i\u3e Systems for Rapid and Efficient Gene Disruption in \u3ci\u3eCandida albicans\u3c/i\u3e

Precise genome modification is essential for the molecular dissection of Candida albicans, and is yielding invaluable information about the roles of specific gene functions in this major fungal pathogen of humans. C. albicans is naturally diploid, unable to undergo meiosis, and utilizes a non-canonical genetic code. Hence, specialized tools have had to be developed for gene disruption in C. albicans that permit the deletion of both target alleles, and in some cases, the recycling of the Candida-specific selectable markers. Previously, we developed a tool based on the Cre recombinase, which recycles markers in C. albicans with 90–100% efficiency via site-specific recombination between loxP sites. Ironically, the utility of this system was hampered by the extreme efficiency of Cre, which prevented the construction in Escherichia coli of stable disruption cassettes carrying a methionine-regulatable CaMET3p-cre gene flanked by loxP sites. Therefore, we have significantly enhanced this system by engineering new Clox cassettes that carry a synthetic, intron-containing cre gene. The Clox kit facilitates efficient transformation and marker recycling, thereby simplifying and accelerating the process of gene disruption in C. albicans. Indeed, homozygous mutants can be generated and their markers resolved within two weeks. The Clox kit facilitates strategies involving single marker recycling or multi-marker gene disruption. Furthermore, it includes the dominant NAT1 marker, as well as URA3, HIS1 and ARG4 cassettes, thereby permitting the manipulation of clinical isolates as well as genetically marked strains of C. albicans. The accelerated gene disruption strategies afforded by this new Clox system are likely to have a profound impact on the speed with which C. albicans pathobiology can be dissected

The environmental stress sensitivities of pathogenic Candida species, including Candida auris, and implications for their spread in the hospital setting

We are grateful to Dr. David Stead, Evelyn Argo and Craig Pattison (Aberdeen Proteomics Core Facility) for their expert identification of Candida isolates by MALDI ToF MS, and to Dr Jill King and our colleagues in the Aberdeen Fungal Group for their helpful advice. AJPB and NARG were supported by a programme grant from the Medical Research Council [www.mrc.ac.uk] (grant number MR/M026663/1) and by the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Mycology and the University of Aberdeen (grant number MR/N006364/1). AJPB was also supported by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Research Council [www.bbsrc.ac.uk] (grant numbers BB/F00513X/1, BB/P020119/1), and AWW by the Scottish Government’s Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services (RESAS) division. NARG was also supported by grants from the Wellcome Trust [www.wellcome.ac.uk] (grant numbers 075470, 086827, 093378, 097377, 099197, 101873, 102705, 200208). DMM was supported by National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) [www.nc3rs.org.uk] (grant numbers NC/S001557/1 and NC/N002482/1) and the UK Biotechnology and Biological Research Council [www.bbsrc.ac.uk] (grant number BB/P02050X/1). HH was supported by the John Duthie Scholarship from the University of Aberdeen’s Development Trust. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD