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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on March 6, 2008
Behavioral Ecology 2008 19(4):920-927; doi:10.1093/beheco/arn019
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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Do birds differentially distribute antimicrobial proteins within clutches of eggs?

Matthew D. Shawkeya, Karl L. Kosciuchb, Mark Liuc, Frank C. Rohwerd, Elizabeth R. Loose, Jennifer M. Wanga and Steven R. Beissingera

a Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, 137 Mulford Hall #3114, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3114, USA b Division of Biology, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA c Department of Biological Sciences, Auburn University, 331 Funchess Hall, Auburn, AL 36849, USA d School of Renewable Natural Resources, Louisiana State University and Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 e Delta Waterfowl, PO Box 3124, Bismarck, ND 38502, USA

Address correspondence to M.D. Shawkey, who is now at Department of Biology, University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325-3908, USA. E-mail: shawkey@uakron.edu. K. Kosciuch is now at the Tetra Tech EC, Inc., Portland, OR, USA.

Received 14 August 2007; revised 17 January 2008; accepted 18 January 2008.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   INTRODUCTION
 
Parents can considerably affect the fitness of their offspring through the additive influences of inherited traits and parental effects (Rossiter 1996Go; Mousseau and Fox 1998Go). These latter, nongenetic factors may be adaptive phenotypic responses to environmental variation that are invested in the egg at some cost and can increase offspring growth and survival (Schwabl 1993Go, 1996Go; Schwabl et al. 1997Go; Mousseau and Fox 1998Go; Eising et al. 2001Go). Among their many functions, eggs must protect embryos from microbial infection because marine and terrestrial environments harbor microbes capable of infecting embryos. Eggs of a variety of animal taxa contain antimicrobial agents (Brogden 2005Go), but antimicrobial defenses in eggs of wild animals remain poorly understood despite the obvious significance of this function (Giacomello et al. 2006Go).

Avian eggs contain a network of defenses against microbial infection. The shell provides physical protection that is . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   MATERIALS AND METHODS
 
Field methods
Protein assays
Statistical analyses
Ethical considerations

   RESULTS
 

   DISCUSSION
 
Distribution of antibiotic enzymes in avian eggs
Is deposition of antibiotics in avian albumen costly enough to warrant differential distribution?

   FUNDING
 

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