Developmental thermal plasticity among Drosophila melanogaster populations.

Many biotic and abiotic variables influence the dispersal and distribution of organisms. Temperature has a major role in determining these patterns because it changes daily, seasonally and spatially, and these fluctuations have a significant impact on an organism's behaviour and fitness. Most ecologically relevant phenotypes that are adaptive are also complex and thus they are influenced by many underlying loci that interact with the environment. In this study, we quantified the degree of thermal phenotypic plasticity within and among populations by measuring chill-coma recovery times of lines reared from egg to adult at two different environmental temperatures. We used sixty genotypes from six natural populations of Drosophila melanogaster sampled along a latitudinal gradient in South America. We found significant variation in thermal plasticity both within and among populations. All populations exhibit a cold acclimation response, with flies reared at lower temperatures having increased resistance to cold. We tested a series of environmental parameters against the variation in population mean thermal plasticity and discovered the mean thermal plasticity was significantly correlated with altitude of origin of the population. Pairing our data with previous experiments on viability fitness assays in the same populations in fixed and variable environments suggests an adaptive role of this thermal plasticity in variable laboratory environments. Altogether, these data demonstrate abundant variation in adaptive thermal plasticity within and among populations.

Estimating molecular masses of petroleum-derived fractions: High mass (>2000u) materials in maltenes and asphaltenes from Maya crude oil.

Molecular mass ranges and average masses of fractions from a heavy Mexican crude oil (Maya) have been studied, using mainly size exclusion chromatography (SEC) and laser desorption-mass spectrometry (LD-MS). Method development focused on the use of planar chromatography and size exclusion chromatography (SEC), to isolate narrow bands of material from solubility-separated fractions of the crude oil. The procedure provides a planar chromatography based method for studying mass ranges in complex hydrocarbon mixtures. It allows the calculation of 'best estimate' values for number and mass-averages. These can then be used in average structural parameter (ASP) calculations, for studying structural features of the samples. The method is applicable to both coal and petroleum-derived samples. The molecular mass estimates arrived at in this work for petroleum-derived samples are considerably higher than those reported by other workers for similar samples. The results presented here provide strong evidence for the presence of ions approaching m/z 10,000 in the Maya asphaltene. The maltene fraction was found to contain a small amount of ions with mass (m/z) in excess of 2000.