Université de Fribourg

Converging seasonal prevalence dynamics in experimental epidemics

Lass, Sandra ; Hottinger, Jürgen W. ; Fabbro, Thomas ; Ebert, Dieter

In: BMC Ecology, 2011, vol. 11, p. 14

Background Regular seasonal changes in prevalence of infectious diseases are often observed in nature, but the mechanisms are rarely understood. Empirical tests aiming at a better understanding of seasonal prevalence patterns are not feasible for most diseases and thus are widely lacking. Here, we set out to study experimentally the seasonal prevalence in an aquatic host-parasite system. The...

Université de Fribourg

Reliable confidence intervals in quantitative genetics: narrow-sense heritability

Fabbro, Thomas ; Davison, Anthony C. ; Steinger, Thomas

In: Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 2008, vol. 115, no. 7, p. 933-944

Many quantitative genetic statistics are functions of variance components, for which a large number of replicates is needed for precise estimates and reliable measures of uncertainty, on which sound interpretation depends. Moreover, in large experiments the deaths of some individuals can occur, so methods for analysing such data need to be robust to missing values. We show how confidence...

Université de Fribourg

Pentatricopeptide repeat proteins in Trypanosoma brucei function in mitochondrial ribosomes

Pusnik, Mascha ; Small, Ian ; Read, Laurie K. ; Fabbro, Thomas ; Schneider, André

In: Molecular and Cellular Biology, 2007, vol. 27, no. 19, p. 6876-6888

The pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR), a degenerate 35-amino-acid motif, defines a novel eukaryotic protein family. Plants have 400 to 500 distinct PPR proteins, whereas other eukaryotes generally have fewer than 5. The few PPR proteins that have been studied have roles in organellar gene expression, probably via direct interaction with RNA. Here we show that the parasitic protozoan Trypanosoma...

Université de Fribourg

Altitudinal differences in flower traits and reproductive allocation

Fabbro, Thomas ; Körner, Christian

In: Flora - Morphology, Distribution, Functional Ecology of Plants, 2004, vol. 99(1), p. 70

We tested whether alpine plants increase their effort to attract pollinators to compensate for assumed pollinator scarcity at high altitude. A three times larger fraction of the shoot was allocated to flowers in alpine plants (30 species, 2700m asl) compared to lowland plants (20 species, 600m asl), while leaf mass fraction did not differ between the altitudes. At high elevation, a three times...