Suchergebnisse

The United Nations (UN) is a multilateral organization that addresses issues that transcend national boundaries. The UN Membership approved in 2015 "The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development", which is built on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that serve as the guidelines to all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership towards achieving a better world (UN, 2022). The UN Development Program (UNDP) is one of the 15 UN agencies that focus on international development to achieve the SDGs. The thesis studies factors determining UNDP SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) aid allocations for projects in countries with armed conflict or political instability (UNDP, 2019b). The topic's relevance lies in the UNDP`s mission statement: "to eradicate poverty and reduce inequality. We help countries to develop policies, leadership skills, partnering abilities, institutional capabilities, and to build resilience to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals." Thus, the multilateral organization's transparency and criteria affecting the decision-making process behind the allocation of project funds is an important topic to research. The objective is to determine the factors that affect aid allocations under SDG 16 related to projects in countries with armed conflict or political instability during 2016-20. The research targets aid allocations for projects for peaceful resolution in countries with armed conflict or political instability as a dependent variable relying on the indicators of the recipient country`s requirements based on GDP per capita, number of victims during the years of conflict, and democracy indexes, etc. A panel data set of 150 observations covering 2016-2020 on 30 recipient countries and ten donor countries was collected to build an econometric model (fixed-effects and random-effects models), together with partial qualitative analysis on the data-generating stage to define the factors affecting the UNDP project aid allocations to recipient countries under SDG 16. The ...

Polyploidy may provide adaptive advantages and is considered to be important for evolution and speciation. Polyploidy events are found throughout the evolutionary history of plants, however they do not seem to be uniformly distributed along the time axis. For example, many of the detected ancient wholegenome duplications (WGDs) seem to cluster around the K/Pg boundary ( 66 Mya), which corresponds to a drastic climate change event and a mass extinction. Here, we discuss more recent polyploidy events using Arabidopsis as the most developed plant model at the level of the entire genus. We review the history of the origin of allotetraploid species A. suecica and A. kamchatica, and tetraploid lineages of A. lyrata, A. arenosa and A. thaliana, and discuss potential adaptive advantages. Also, we highlight an association between recent glacial maxima and estimated times of origins of polyploidy in Arabidopsis. Such association might further support a link between polyploidy and environmental challenge, which has been observed now for different timescales and for both ancient and recent polyploids. ; PYN is a postdoctoral fellow ofThe Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), 12S9618N. YVdP acknowledges the Multidisciplinary Research Partnership 'Bioinformatics: from nucleotides to networks' Project (no. 01MR0310W) of Ghent University, and funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under European Research Council Advanced Grant Agreement 322739 – DOUBLEUP. ; https://www.journals.elsevier.com/current-opinion-in-plant-biology ; am2018 ; Genetics

Polyploidy has played an important role in evolution across the tree of life but it is still unclear how polyploid lineages may persist after their initial formation. While both common and well-studied in plants, polyploidy is rare in animals and generally less understood. The Australian burrowing frog genus Neobatrachus is comprised of six diploid and three polyploid species and offers a powerful animal polyploid model system. We generated exome-capture sequence data from 87 individuals representing all nine species of Neobatrachus to investigate species-level relationships, the origin and inheritance mode of polyploid species, and the population genomic effects of polyploidy on genus-wide demography. We describe rapid speciation of diploid Neobatrachus species and show that the three independently originated polyploid species have tetrasomic or mixed inheritance. We document higher genetic diversity in tetraploids, resulting from widespread gene flow between the tetraploids, asymmetric inter-ploidy gene flow directed from sympatric diploids to tetraploids, and isolation of diploid species from each other. We also constructed models of ecologically suitable areas for each species to investigate the impact of climate on differing ploidy levels. These models suggest substantial change in suitable areas compared to past climate, which correspond to population genomic estimates of demographic histories. We propose that Neobatrachus diploids may be suffering the early genomic impacts of climate-induced habitat loss, while tetraploids appear to be avoiding this fate, possibly due to widespread gene flow. Finally, we demonstrate that Neobatrachus is an attractive model to study the effects of ploidy on the evolution of adaptation in animals. ; P.Y.N acknowledges postdoctoral fellowship from The Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), 12S9618N. This work was also supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant number ERC-StG 679056 ...