Alteration of the temporal association between courtship audio and visual components affects female sexual response

Some multimodal signals—that is, occurring in more than one sensory modality—appear to carry additional information which is not present when component signals are presented separately. To understand the function of male ring dove's (Streptopelia risoria) multimodal courtship, we used audiovisual playback of male displays to investigate female response to stimuli differing in their audiovisual timing. From natural courtship recordings, we created a shifted stimulus where audio was shifted relative to video by a fixed value and a jittered stimulus, where each call was moved randomly along the visual channel. We presented 3 groups of females with the same stimulus type, that is, control, shifted, and jittered, for 7 days. We recorded their behavior and assessed pre- and post-test blood estradiol concentration. We found that playback exposure increased estradiol levels, confirming that this technique can be efficiently used to study doves’ sexual communication. Additionally, chasing behavior (indicating sexual stimulation) increased over experimental days only in the control condition, suggesting a role of multimodal timing on female response. This stresses the importance of signal configuration in multimodal communication, as additional information is likely to be contained in the temporal association between modalities.     

Insights into the Variation in Bioactivities of Closely Related Streptomyces Strains from Marine Sediments of the Visayan Sea against ESKAPE and Ovarian Cancer

Marine sediments host diverse actinomycetes that serve as a source of new natural products to combat infectious diseases and cancer. Here, we report the biodiversity, bioactivities against ESKAPE pathogens (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter spp.) and ovarian cancer, and metabolites variation among culturable actinomycetes isolated from the marine sediments of Visayan Sea, Philippines. We identified 15 Streptomyces species based on a 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis. The crude extracts of 10 Streptomyces species have inhibited the growth of ESKAPE pathogens with minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values ranging from 0.312 mg/mL to 20 mg/mL depending on the strain and pathogens targeted. Additionally, ten crude extracts have antiproliferative activity against A2780 human ovarian carcinoma at 2 mg/mL. To highlight, we observed that four phylogenetically identical Streptomyces albogriseolus strains demonstrated variation in antibiotic and anticancer activities. These strains harbored type I and II polyketide synthase (PKS) and non-ribosomal synthetase (NRPS) genes in their genomes, implying that their bioactivity is independent of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-detected bio-synthetic gene clusters (BGCs) in this study. Metabolite profiling revealed that the taxonomically identical strains produced core and strain-specific metabolites. Thus, the chemical diversity among these strains influences the variation observed in their biological activities. This study expanded our knowledge on the potential of marine-derived Streptomyces residing from the unexplored regions of the Visayan Sea as a source of small molecules against ESKAPE pathogens and cancer. It also highlights that Streptomyces species strains produce unique strain-specific secondary metabolites; thus, offering new chemical space for natural product discovery.