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The original article was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2010 10:39
Circadian clocks are found in organisms of almost all domains including photosynthetic Cyanobacteria, whereby large diversity exists within the protein components involved. In the model cyanobacterium Synechococc...
Gene duplications provide genetic material for the evolution of new morphological and physiological features. One copy can preserve the original gene functions while the second copy may evolve new functions (n...
Predation is ubiquitous in nature. One form of predation is cannibalism, which is affected by many factors such as size structure and resource density. However, cannibalism may also be influenced by abiotic fa...
Conures are a morphologically diverse group of Neotropical parrots classified as members of the tribe Arini, which has recently been subjected to a taxonomic revision. The previously broadly defined Aratinga genu...
Quantifying morphological diversity across taxa can provide valuable insight into evolutionary processes, yet its complexities can make it difficult to identify appropriate units for evaluation. One of the cha...
Adaptive plasticity is essential for many species to cope with environmental heterogeneity. In particular, developmental plasticity allows organisms with complex life cycles to adaptively adjust the timing of ...
The cytosolic arrestin proteins mediate desensitization of activated G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) via competition with G proteins for the active phosphorylated receptors. Arrestins in active, including ...
Fish classifications, as those of most other taxonomic groups, are being transformed drastically as new molecular phylogenies provide support for natural groups that were unanticipated by previous studies. A b...
Structural variation among genomes is now viewed to be as important as single nucleoid polymorphisms in influencing the phenotype and evolution of a species. Segmental duplication (SD) is defined as segments o...
In seabirds, the extent of population genetic and phylogeographic structure varies extensively among species. Genetic structure is lacking in some species, but present in others despite the absence of obvious ...
Recent work suggests that gene duplications may play an important role in the evolution of immunity genes. Passerine birds, and in particular Sylvioidea warblers, have highly duplicated major histocompatibilit...
Demographic bottlenecks erode genetic diversity and may increase endangered species’ extinction risk via decreased fitness and adaptive potential. The genetic status of species is generally assessed using neut...
Evidence for the transmission of non-genetic information from father to offspring is rapidly accumulating. While the impact of chemical and physical factors such as toxins or diet on the fitness of the parents...
The original article was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:116
The ever increasing availability of genomes makes it possible to investigate and compare not only the genomic complements of genes and proteins, but also of RNAs. One class of RNAs, the long noncoding RNAs (ln...
There is a general lack of information on the dispersal and genetic structuring for populations of small-sized deep-water taxa, including free-living nematodes which inhabit and dominate the seafloor sediments...
The herbivore lifestyle leads to encounters with plant toxins and requires mechanisms to overcome suboptimal nutrient availability in plant tissues. Although the evolution of bacterial endosymbiosis alleviated...
The Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) plays a central role in immunity and has been given considerable attention by evolutionary ecologists due to its associations with fitness-related traits. Songbirds h...
The tribe Coccinellini is a group of relatively large ladybird beetles that exhibits remarkable morphological and biological diversity. Many species are aphidophagous, feeding as larvae and adults on aphids, b...
Many species are shifting their ranges in response to global climate change. Range expansions are known to have profound effects on the genetic composition of populations. The evolution of dispersal during ran...
The earliest seed plants in the Late Devonian (Famennian) are abundant and well known. However, most of them lack information regarding the frond system and reconstruction. Cosmosperma polyloba represents the fir...
Insulin receptor substrate (Irs) proteins are essential for insulin signaling as they allow downstream effectors to dock with, and be activated by, the insulin receptor. A family of four Irs proteins have been...
Phylogenetic codon models are often used to characterize the selective regimes acting on protein-coding sequences. Recent methodological developments have led to models explicitly accounting for the interplay ...
Hedera (ivies) is one of the few temperate genera of the primarily tropical Asian Palmate group of the Araliaceae, which extends its range out of Asia to Europe and the Mediterranean b...
The colonial habit of Brandt’s vole (Lasiopodomys brandtii) differs from that of most other species of the genus Microtus. The demographic history of this species and the patterns shaping its current genetic stru...
Most birds exhibit bi-parental care with both sexes providing food for their young. Nestling signal food needs through begging. However, for some species, males rarely visit the nest, so have limited opportuni...
Natural selection favors changes that lead to genotypes possessing high fitness. A conflict arises when several mutations are required for adaptation, but each mutation is separately deleterious. The process o...
Classical cadherins are a metazoan-specific family of homophilic cell-cell adhesion molecules that regulate morphogenesis. Type I and type IV cadherins in this family function at adherens junctions in the majo...
Triticeae, the tribe of wheat grasses, harbours the cereals barley, rye and wheat and their wild relatives. Although economically important, relationships within the tribe are still not understood. We analysed...
On-going global climate change poses a serious threat for natural populations unless they are able to evolutionarily adapt to changing environmental conditions (e.g. increasing average temperatures, occurrence...
Brachypodium distachyon (Poaceae), an annual Mediterranean Aluminum (Al)-sensitive grass, is currently being used as a model species to provide new information on cereals and biofuel c...
Cylindrus obtusus is one of the most prominent endemic snail species of the Eastern Alps. It is restricted to alpine meadows and calcareous rocky habitats above 1500 m. Peculiar intras...
Chemical defences are widespread in animals, but how their production is adjusted to ecological conditions is poorly known. Optimal defence theory predicts that inducible defences are favoured over constitutiv...
Amino acid substitution models play an essential role in inferring phylogenies from mitochondrial protein data. However, only few empirical models have been estimated from restricted mitochondrial protein data...
The original article was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:90
There is theoretical and empirical evidence for strong sexual selection in males having positive effects on population viability by serving to purify the genome of its mutation load at a low demographic cost. ...
Previous studies have demonstrated that the clear morphological differences among vertebrae across the presacral column are accompanied by heterogeneous functional signals in vertebral shape. Further, several ...
Many animal and plant species in the Middle East and northern Africa have a predominantly longitudinal distribution, extending from Iran and Turkey along the eastern Mediterranean coast into northern Africa. T...
The Philippine archipelago is globally one of the most important model island systems for studying evolutionary processes. However, most plant species on this archipelago have not yet been studied in sufficien...
Distinct hybrid zones and phenotypic and genomic divergence is often observed between marine and freshwater threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus). Nevertheless, cases also exist where marine-freshwater...
Taxonomy offers precise species identification and delimitation and thus provides basic information for biological research, e.g. through assessment of species richness. The importance of molecular taxonomy, i...
Sexual selection is thought to promote evolutionary changes and diversification. However, the impact of sexual selection in relation to other selective forces is difficult to evaluate. Male digger wasps of the...
Parasitoids are hyperdiverse and can contain morphologically and functionally cryptic species, making them challenging to study. Parasitoid speciation can arise from specialisation on niches or diverging hosts...
Geographical and temporal patterns of diversification in bee hummingbirds (Mellisugini) were assessed with respect to the evolution of migration, critical for colonization of North America. We generated a date...
Proteomic studies of skeletal proteins have revealed large, complex mixtures of proteins occluded within the mineral. Many skeletal proteomes contain rapidly evolving proteins with repetitive domains, further ...
The evolution of larger brain volumes relative to body size in Mammalia is the subject of an extensive amount of research. Early on palaeontologists were interested in the brain of cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, and...
Earthworms (Crassiclitellata) are a diverse group of annelids of substantial ecological and economic importance. Earthworms are primarily terrestrial infaunal animals, and as such are probably rather poor natu...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:204
Chemolithoautotrophic primary production sustains dense invertebrate communities at deep-sea hydrothermal vents and hydrocarbon seeps. Symbiotic bacteria that oxidize dissolved sulfur, methane, and hydrogen ga...
Dispersal ability, population genetic structure and species divergence in marine nematodes are still poorly understood, especially in remote areas such as the Southern Ocean. We investigated genetic differenti...
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