Rhodamine B – a non-toxic biomarker for assessing the distance travelled by rats in urban slums

Post provided by Awoniyi Michael Adedayo Each year Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best paper published in the journal by an author at the start of their career. Ten Early Career Researchers made the shortlist for this year’s prize, including Awoniyi Michael Adedayo, who recently defended his PhD from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) Brazil. In this … Continue reading Rhodamine B – a non-toxic biomarker for assessing the distance travelled by rats in urban slums

Using Dual RNA-seq to Investigate Host-Pathogen Systems When Genomic Resources are Limited

Post provided by KAYLEIGH O’KEEFFE

Tall fescue infected with fungal pathogen, Rhizoctonia solani. ©Brooklynn Newberry
Tall fescue infected with fungal pathogen, Rhizoctonia solani. ©Brooklynn Newberry

Pathogens and the infectious diseases that they cause can have devastating impacts on host individuals and populations. To better understand how pathogens are able to cause disease, we can investigate the genetic mechanisms underlying the infection process. Hosts may respond to infection by upregulating defence pathways. Pathogens, in turn, evade these host immune responses as they infect and cause disease. As this process unfolds and each organism responds to the other, gene expression changes in both the host and the pathogen. These gene expression changes can be captured by dual RNA‐seq, which simultaneously captures the gene expression profiles of a host and of a pathogen during infection. Continue reading “Using Dual RNA-seq to Investigate Host-Pathogen Systems When Genomic Resources are Limited”