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cited By 10; International audience; The morphology of two Mediterranean and one Atlantic populations of European Storm-Petrel was analysed using discriminant analysis. Four separate morphological characters were studied to separate Mediterranean and Atlantic populations; five were used within the Mediterranean meta-populations. Results confirm Mediterranean Storm-Petrels to be markedly different from those from the Atlantic and indicate significant variations within Mediterranean populations. The differentiation between the two Mediterranean populations studied relies on two morphological characters: height of the mandible and length of the folded wing.

cited By 8; International audience; CM-gag elements constitute an homogeneous family of sequences that are reiterated in the genome of Culex pipiens strains from different continents. Apparently complete 1.75 kb CM-gag copies are flanked by target-site duplications and have a polyadenylation signal near their 3' end. They potentially contain a unique gene encoding a putative protein that displays homologies with nucleic acid binding proteins and the gag polypeptide of retroviruses and retrotransposons, but that does not encode a reverse transcriptase. CM-gag elements are similar in their genetic organization to the telomeric transposable sequences Het-A from Drosophila melanogaster, but Southern-hybridization patterns indicate that the former are more probably dispersed in various areas of the mosquito genome. The homogeneity of CM-gag copies that are distributed worldwide suggests that they have most probably been amplified recently. Furthermore, selective constraints against amino acid changes have been acting on these sequences, suggesting that they need to encode the gag-like protein to be incorporated into the chromosomes.