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Interspecies animal hybrids can employ clonal or hemiclonal reproduction modes where one or all parental genomes are transmitted to the progeny without recombination. Nevertheless, some interspecies hybrids re...
Social insects form densely crowded societies in environments with high pathogen loads, but have evolved collective defences that mitigate the impact of disease. However, colony-founding queens lack this prote...
Recently, important discoveries regarding the archaeon that functioned as the “host” in the merger with a bacterium that led to the eukaryotes, its “complex” nature, and its phylogenetic relationship to eukary...
The Spiralia are a large, morphologically diverse group of protostomes (e.g. molluscs, annelids, nemerteans) that share a homologous mode of early development called spiral cleavage. One of the most highly-con...
Species with broad distributions frequently divide into multiple genetic forms and may therefore be viewed as “cryptic species”. Here, we used the mitochondrial cytochrome b (Cytb) and 12 nuclear DNA loci to inve...
Small non-coding RNAs, including miRNAs, and gene silencing mediated by RNA interference have been described in free-living and parasitic lineages of flatworms, but only few key factors of the small RNA pathwa...
A common form of cooperation in bacteria is based on the secretion of beneficial metabolites, shareable as public good among cells within a group. Because cooperation can be exploited by “cheating” mutants, wh...
Homoplasy affects demographic inference estimates. This effect has been recognized and corrective methods have been developed. However, no studies so far have defined what homoplasy metrics best describe the e...
This study aims to assess the role that Pleistocene refugia, rivers and local habitat conditions may have played in the evolutionary diversification of three central African duiker species (Cephalophus dorsalis, ...
The last eukaryotic common ancestor already had an amazingly complex cell possessing genomic and cellular features such as spliceosomal introns, mitochondria, cilia-dependent motility, and a cytoskeleton toget...
Pleistocene climatic fluctuations are known to be an engine of biotic diversification at higher latitudes, but their impact on highly diverse tropical areas such as the Andes remains less well-documented. Spec...
Filamentous cyanobacteria that differentiate multiple cell types are considered the peak of prokaryotic complexity and their evolution has been studied in the context of multicellularity origins. Species that ...
Segmental composition and homologies of the head of stem-group Euarthropoda have been the foci of recent studies on arthropod origins. An emerging hypothesis suggests that upper-stem group euarthropods possess...
Interspecific interactions have long been assumed to play an important role in diversification. Mutualistic interactions, such as nursery pollination mutualisms, have been proposed as good candidates for diver...
Cetacean brain size expansion is an enigmatic event in mammalian evolution, yet its genetic basis remains poorly explored. Here, all exons of the seven primary microcephaly (MCPH) genes that play key roles in siz...
The systematic positions of the extinct insect orders Hypoperlida, Miomoptera and Permopsocida were enigmatic and unstable for nearly a century. The recent studies based on new material, especially from the Ce...
Estimating the variability in isolation times across co-distributed taxon pairs that may have experienced the same allopatric isolating mechanism is a core goal of comparative phylogeography. The use of hierar...
The molecular basis of evolutionary change is assumed to be genetic variation. However, growing evidence suggests that epigenetic mechanisms, such as DNA methylation, may also be involved in rapid adaptation t...
The adaptive evolution of species response to environment are the key issues in molecular ecology and evolutionary biology. The direction of adaptive differentiation of species in regions lacking strong select...
The impacts of hybridization on the process of speciation are manifold, leading to distinct patterns across the genome. Genetic differentiation accumulates in certain genomic regions, while divergence is hampe...
For Lake Victoria cichlid species inhabiting rocky substrates with differing light regimes, it has been proposed that adaptation of the long-wavelength-sensitive (LWS) opsin gene triggered speciation by sensory d...
Non-coding small RNAs (sRNAs) regulate a variety of important biological processes across all life domains, including bacteria. However, little is known about the functional evolution of sRNAs in bacteria, whi...
Especially on islands closer to the mainland, such as the Canary Islands, different lineages that originated by multiple colonization events could have merged by hybridization, which then could have promoted r...
Animals use information from their environment to make decisions, ultimately to maximize their fitness. The nematode C. elegans has a pheromone signalling system, which hitherto has principally been thought to be...
There is increasing recognition of the concordance between marine biogeographic and phylogeographic boundaries. However, it is still unclear how population-level divergence translates into species-level diverg...
Diet composition (yeast:carbohydrate ratio) is an important determinant of growth, development, and reproduction. Recent studies have shown that decreased yeast intake elicits numerous transcriptomic changes a...
Satellite DNAs (stDNAs) are highly repeated sequences that constitute large portions of any genome. The evolutionary dynamics of stDNA (e.g. copy number, nucleotide sequence, location) can, therefore, provide ...
Numerous biological functions of long intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) have been identified. However, the contribution of lincRNAs to the domestication process has remained elusive. Following domesticatio...
Theory predicts that colour polymorphism may be favored by variation in the visual context under which signals are perceived. The context encompasses all environmental determinants of light availability and pr...
Animal and plant species can harbour microbes that provide them with protection against enemies. These beneficial microbes can be a significant component of host defence that complement or replaces a repertoir...
Past events like fluctuations in population size and post-glacial colonization processes may influence the relative importance of genetic drift, migration and selection when determining the present day pattern...
The Asimina-Disepalum clade (Annonaceae subfam. Annonoideae tribe Annoneae) includes a major Neotropical-Asian biogeographical disjunction. We evaluate whether this disjunction can be explained by the Eocene bore...
B4galnt2 is a blood group-related glycosyltransferase that displays cis-regulatory variation for its tissue-specific expression patterns in house mice. The wild type allele, found e.g....
Hundreds of herbarium collections have accumulated a valuable heritage and knowledge of plants over several centuries. Recent initiatives started ambitious preservation plans to digitize this information and m...
Pollen tube growth and fertilization are key processes in angiosperm sexual reproduction. The transmitting tract (TT) of Nicotiana tabacum controls pollen tube growth in part by secreting pistil extensin-like pro...
The distribution of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages in Brazil is heterogeneous due to different regional colonization dynamics. Northeastern Brazil, although being an important region in terms of human imig...
Molecular taxonomy studies and barcoding projects can provide rapid means of detecting cryptic diversity. Nevertheless, the use of molecular data for species delimitation should be undertaken with caution. Esp...
The RAS signaling pathway is a pivotal developmental pathway that controls many fundamental biological processes including cell proliferation, differentiation, movement and apoptosis. Drosophila Seven-IN-Absentia...
Hybridization is observed in many eukaryotic lineages and can lead to the formation of polyploid species. The study of hybridization and polyploidization faces challenges both in data generation and in account...
Small insertions and deletions occur in humans at a lower rate compared to nucleotide changes, but evolve under more constraint than nucleotide changes. While the evolution of insertions and deletions have bee...
Transposable elements are major contributors to genome size and variability, accounting for approximately 70–80% of the maize, barley, and wheat genomes. PIF and Pong-like elements belong to two closely-related e...
The p53 signalling pathway, which controls cell fate, has been extensively studied due to its prominent role in tumor development. The pathway includes the tumor supressor protein p53, its vertebrate paralogs ...
Bacillus cereus sensu lato (s. l.) is an ecologically diverse bacterial group of medical and agricultural significance. In this study, I use publicly available genomes and novel bioinf...
Developmental associations often explain phenotypic integration. The intersected hormonal regulation of ontogenetic processes fosters predictions of steroid-mediated phenotypic integration among sexually dimor...
Skippers (Family: Hesperiidae) are a large group of butterflies with ca. 4000 species under 567 genera. The lack of a time-calibrated higher-level phylogeny of the group has precluded understanding of its evol...
The performance and fitness of social societies mainly depends on the efficiency of interactions between reproductive individuals and helpers. Helpers need to react to the group’s requirements and to adjust th...
The nervous system in brachiopods has seldom been studied with modern methods. An understanding of lophophore innervation in adult brachiopods is useful for comparing the innervation of the same lophophore typ...
The sulfoxidation of methionine residues within the phosphorylation motif of protein kinase substrates, may provide a mechanism to couple oxidative signals to changes in protein phosphorylation. Herein, we hyp...
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