New and Exciting in PLoS Biology

Birds Do It, Bees Do It, but Candida albicans Does It Differently:

The yeast Candida albicans lives an unnoticed and mostly harmless life as a member of our gut flora. However, mainly in an immunocompromised host, it can proliferate and cause severe, life-threatening infections. Within this normally mild-mannered, single-celled fungus beats the heart of a reproductive adventurer. For while it appears to be incapable of meiosis and therefore true sex, it engages in an unusual and offbeat alternative--after it mates, its progeny randomly cast off chromosomes to restore the diploid number, or something close to it. In a new study, Anja Forche, Richard Bennett, and colleagues show that this process generates significant genetic diversity, which is further amplified by recombination between homologous chromosomes, using a protein that is elsewhere used exclusively in meiosis.

The Challenge of Conserving Amphibian Megadiversity in Madagascar:

Frogs from Madagascar constitute one of the richest groups of amphibian fauna in the world, with currently 238 described species; caecilians and salamanders are absent [1]. Several frog radiations of the island are species-rich and parallel lemurs and tenrecs in their astonishing morphological and ecological diversity. According to the Global Amphibian Assessment (GAA), Madagascar ranks as the country with the 12th highest amphibian species richness [2,3] (see also http://www.globalamphibians.org), but this is likely an underestimate, because an additional 182 candidate species have been identified since [1]. Diversity is concentrated in rainforests and can locally reach over 100 species. Impressively, 100% of the autochthonous species and 88% of the genera are strictly endemic to Madagascar and its inshore islands [1]. Most of these species belong to two radiations of astonishing ecomorphological and reproductive diversity, the mantellids and the scaphiophrynine plus cophyline microhylids.