Premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) is a common cause of infertility in women, characterised by amenorrhea and elevated FSH under the age of 40 years. In some cases, POI is syndromic in association with other features such as sensorineural hearing loss in Perrault syndrome. POI is a heterogeneous disease with over 80 causative genes known so far; however, these explain only a minority of cases. Using whole-exome sequencing (...

With ongoing introductions into Australia since the 1700s, the European rabbit ( Oryctolagus cuniculus ) has become one of the most widely distributed and abundant vertebrate pests, adversely impacting Australia's biodiversity and agroeconomy. To understand the population and range dynamics of the species and its impacts better, occurrence and abundance data have been collected by researchers and citizens from sites covering a...

Thermal performance curves ( TPC s), which quantify how an ectotherm's body temperature ( T b ) affects its performance or fitness, are often used in an attempt to predict organismal responses to climate change. Here, we examine the key – but often biologically unreasonable – assumptions underlying this approach; for example, that physiology and thermal regimes are invariant over ontogeny, space and time, and also that TPC s a...

Accurate ground‐based estimation of the carbon stored in terrestrial ecosystems is critical to quantifying the global carbon budget. Allometric models provide cost‐effective methods for biomass prediction. But do such models vary with ecoregion or plant functional type? We compiled 15 054 measurements of individual tree or shrub biomass from across Australia to examine the generality of allometric models for above‐ground bioma...

Conservation actions could be more efficient if there is congruence among taxa in the distribution of species. Patterns in the geographical distribution of five taxa were used to identify nationally important regions for conservation in Canada. Two measures of surrogacy were significantly and positively correlated among taxa, and conservation areas selected for one taxon represented other taxa significantly better than random...