Abstract
Hormones are central regulators of organismal function and flexibility that mediate a diversity of phenotypic traits from early development through senescence. Yet despite these important roles, basic questions about how and why hormone systems vary within and across species remain unanswered. Here we describe HormoneBase, a database of circulating steroid hormone levels and their variation across vertebrates. This database aims to provide all available data on the mean, variation, and range of plasma glucocorticoids (both baseline and stress-induced) and androgens in free-living and un-manipulated adult vertebrates. HormoneBase (www.HormoneBase.org) currently includes >6,580 entries from 476 species, reported in 648 publications from 1967 to 2015, and unpublished datasets. Entries are associated with data on the species and population, sex, year and month of study, geographic coordinates, life history stage, method and latency of hormone sampling, and analysis technique. This novel resource could be used for analyses of the function and evolution of hormone systems, and the relationships between hormonal variation and a variety of processes including phenotypic variation, fitness, and species distributions.
Highlights
Background & SummaryHormones are central regulators of phenotype, whose effects span multiple fields of research, from molecular biology to population biology[1,2,3,4,5]
A promising approach to answering such questions – and many others of broad interest to animal behaviour and organismal biology – lies in large-scale comparative analyses of the multitude of endocrine data that have been collected over the past several decades
We present HormoneBase, a resource of compiled endocrine data across vertebrates
Summary
Hormones are central regulators of phenotype, whose effects span multiple fields of research, from molecular biology to population biology[1,2,3,4,5]. Identifying and characterizing the variation in endocrine traits, and their links with environment, life history, and fitness, could provide insight into how endocrine systems evolve, and how selection on these phenotypic integrators may influence the dynamics and distribution of populations[20,21,22,23]. In this context, we present HormoneBase, a resource of compiled endocrine data across vertebrates. By making HormoneBase publicly available we aim to encourage data sharing across the scientific community and facilitate research into the function and evolution of physiological traits
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