(C) 2009 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Several studies have shown that classical results of microparasite evolution could not extend to the case where the host species shows an important spatial structure. Rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV), responsible for rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD), which recently emerged in rabbits, has strains within a wide range of virulence, thus providing an interesting example

of competition between strains infecting a host species with a metapopulation structure. In addition, rabbits may show a genetic diversity regarding RHDV susceptibility. In the present paper we use the example of the rabbit-RHDV interaction to study the competition between strains of a same microparasite in a host population that find more is both spatially and genetically structured. Using metapopulation models we show that the evolution of the microparasite is guided by a trade-off between its capacity to invade subpopulations potentially infected by other strains and its capacity to persist within the subpopulation. In such a context, host genetic diversity acts by reducing the number of hosts susceptible to each strain, often favouring more persistent-and generally less virulent-strains. We also show that even in a stochastic selleck context where host genes regularly go locally extinct, the microparasite

pressure helps maintain the genetic diversity in the long term while reinforcing gene loss risk in the short term. Finally, we study how different demographic and epiderniologic parameters affect the coevolution between the rabbit and RHDV. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Ocular dominance (OD) plasticity is a classic paradigm for studying the effect of experience and deprivation on cortical development, and is manifested as shifts in the relative

strength of binocular inputs to primary visual cortex (V1). The mouse has become an increasingly popular model for mechanistic studies of OD plasticity and, consequently, it is important that Mephenoxalone we understand how binocularity is constructed in this species. One puzzling feature of the mouse visual system is the gross disparity between the physiological strength of each eye in V1 and their anatomical representation in the projection from retina to the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN). While the contralateral-to-ipsilateral (C/1) ratio of visually evoked responses in binocular V1 is similar to 2:1, the ipsilateral retinal projection is weakly represented in terms of retinal ganglion cell (RGC) density where the C/I ratio is similar to 9:1. The structural basis for this relative amplification of ipsilateral eye responses between retina and V1 is not known. Here we employed neuroanatomical tracing and morphometric techniques to quantify the relative magnitude of each eye’s input to and output from the binocular segment of dLGN.