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Cave-dwelling animals evolve various traits as a consequence of life in darkness. Constructive traits (e.g., enhanced non-visual sensory systems) presumably arise under strong selective pressures. The mechanis...
In plant-feeding insects, the evolutionary retention of polyphagy remains puzzling. A better understanding of the relationship between these organisms and changes in the metabolome of their host plants is like...
Anchored hybrid enrichment is a form of next-generation sequencing that uses oligonucleotide probes to target conserved regions of the genome flanked by less conserved regions in order to acquire data useful f...
Over the past 40 million years water temperatures have dramatically dropped in the Southern Ocean, which has led to the local extinction of most nearshore fish lineages. The evolution of antifreeze glycoprotei...
RLSB, an S-1 domain RNA binding protein of Arabidopsis, selectively binds rbcL mRNA and co-localizes with Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco) within chloroplasts of C3 and C4 plants. Previou...
Geographic and demographic factors as well as specialisation to a new host-plant may lead to host-associated differentiation in plant-feeding insects. We explored the phylogeography of a protected moth, Graellsia...
One aspect of premating isolation between diverging, locally-adapted population pairs is female mate choice for resident over alien male phenotypes. Mating preferences often show considerable individual variat...
The disjunct distribution of several Palearctic species has been widely shaped by the changes in climatic conditions during the Quaternary. The observed genetic differentiation or reproductive isolation betwee...
Replicate population pairs that diverge in response to similar selective regimes allow for an investigation of (a) whether phenotypic traits diverge in a similar and predictable fashion, (b) whether there is grad...
The optimal allocation of resources to sexual signals and other life history traits is usually dependent on an individual’s condition, while variation in the expression of sexual traits across environments dep...
RNA editing by C-to-U conversions is nearly omnipresent in land plant chloroplasts and mitochondria, where it mainly serves to reconstitute conserved codon identities in the organelle mRNAs. Reverse U-to-C RNA...
With female multiple mating (polyandry), male-male competition extends to after copulation (sperm competition). Males respond to this selective pressure through physiological, morphological and behavioural ada...
Modern cold-water coral and tropical coral environments harbor a highly diverse and ecologically important macrofauna of crustaceans that face elevated extinction risks due to reef decline. The effect of envir...
The number of partners that individuals mate with over their lifetime is a defining feature of mating systems, and variation in mate number is thought to be a major driver of sexual evolution. Although previou...
Understanding the mechanisms and selective forces leading to adaptive radiations and origin of biodiversity is a major goal of evolutionary biology. Acrocephalus warblers are small passerines that underwent an ad...
Comparative investigations on bilaterian neurogenesis shed light on conserved developmental mechanisms across taxa. With respect to annelids, most studies focus on taxa deeply nested within the annelid tree, w...
Understanding the processes underlying diversification is a central question in evolutionary biology. For butterflies, access to new host plants provides opportunities for adaptive speciation. On the one hand,...
Mating systems that reduce dispersal and lead to non-random mating might increase the potential for genetic structure to arise at fine geographic scales. Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) have a lek...
All vertebrates initially feed their offspring using yolk reserves. In some live-bearing species these yolk reserves may be supplemented with extra nutrition via a placenta. Sharks belonging to the Carcharhini...
Dispersal is often associated with a suite of phenotypic traits that might reduce dispersal costs, but can be energetically costly themselves outside dispersal. Hence, dispersing and philopatric individuals mi...
Phosphodiesterase 6 (PDE6) is a protein complex that hydrolyses cGMP and acts as the effector of the vertebrate phototransduction cascade. The PDE6 holoenzyme consists of catalytic and inhibitory subunits belo...
Wnt proteins are secreted signalling molecules found in all animal phyla. In bilaterian animals, including humans, Wnt proteins play key roles in development, maintenance of homeostasis and regeneration. While...
Local adaptation, the differential success of genotypes in their native versus foreign environment, arises from various evolutionary processes, but the importance of concurrent abiotic and biotic factors as dr...
Aggressive behaviors are an integral part of competitive interactions. There is considerable variation in aggressiveness among individuals both within and among species. Aggressiveness is a quantitative trait ...
Homology inference is pivotal to evolutionary biology and is primarily based on significant sequence similarity, which, in general, is a good indicator of homology. Algorithms have also been designed to utiliz...
The subtribe Vampyressina (sensu Baker et al. 2003) encompasses approximately 43 species and seven genera and is a recent and diversified group of New World leaf-nosed bats specialized in fruit eating. The system...
Wolbachia is one of the most widespread bacteria on Earth. Previous research on Wolbachia-host interactions indicates that the bacterium is typically transferred vertically, from mothe...
Digestive cells are present in all metazoans and provide the energy necessary for the whole organism. Pancreatic exocrine cells are a unique vertebrate cell type involved in extracellular digestion of a wide r...
Despite the great importance of lepidopteran wing patterns in various biological disciplines, homologies between wing pattern elements in different moth and butterfly lineages are still not understood. Among o...
Recent developments in Bayesian phylogenetic models have increased the range of inferences that can be drawn from molecular sequence data. Accordingly, model selection has become an important component of phyl...
The evolution of novel genes is thought to be a critical component of morphological innovation but few studies have explicitly examined the contribution of novel genes to the evolution of novel tissues. Nemato...
Convergent evolution has been a challenging topic for decades, being cetaceans, pinnipeds and sirenians textbook examples of three independent origins of equivalent phenotypes. These mammalian lineages acquire...
The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) plays a crucial role in the adaptive immune system and has been extensively studied across vertebrate taxa. Although the function of MHC genes appears to be conserved...
Bacterial global regulators each regulate the expression of several hundred genes. In Escherichia coli, the top seven global regulators together control over half of all genes. Leucine-responsive regulatory prote...
Developmental processes that underpin morphological variation have become a focus of interest when attempting to interpret macroevolutionary patterns. Recently, the Dental Inhibitory Cascade (dic) model has been ...
The metabolic theory of ecology stipulates that molecular evolutionary rates should correlate with temperature and latitude in ectothermic organisms. Previous studies have shown that most groups of vertebrates...
Kinetoplastea is a diverse protist lineage composed of several of the most successful parasites on Earth, organisms whose metabolisms have coevolved with those of the organisms they infect. Parasitic kinetopla...
In recent years, several types of molecular markers and new microscale skeletal characters have shown potential as powerful tools for phylogenetic reconstructions and higher-level taxonomy of scleractinian cor...
Arthropods have received much attention as a model for studying opsin evolution in invertebrates. Yet, relatively few studies have investigated the diversity of opsin proteins that underlie spectral sensitivit...
The visual system is important for animals for mate choice, food acquisition, and predator avoidance. Animals possessing a visual system can sense particular wavelengths of light emanating from objects and the...
Biparental inbreeding, mating between two relatives, occurs at a low frequency in many natural plant populations, which also often have substantial rates of self-fertilization. Although biparental inbreeding i...
Sexual selection favours the evolution of male bioactive substances transferred during mating to enhance male reproductive success by affecting female physiology. These effects are mainly well documented for s...
Four plastid regions, rpoB, rpoC1, matK, and trnH-psbA, have been recommended as DNA barcodes for plants. Their success in delimiting species boundaries depends on the existence of a clear-cut difference between ...
Studying how trophic traits and niche use are related in natural populations is important in order to understand adaptation and specialization. Here, we describe trophic trait diversity in twenty-five Norwegia...
Intralocus sexual conflict, arising from selection for different alleles at the same locus in males and females, imposes a constraint on sex-specific adaptation. Intralocus sexual conflict can be alleviated by...
The outcome of the arms race between hosts and pathogens depends heavily on the interactions between their genetic diversity, population size and transmission ability. Theory predicts that genetically diverse ...
Signals are essential for communication and play a fundamental role in the evolution and diversification of species. Olfactory, visual and acoustic species-specific signals have been shown to function for spec...
Genetic architecture of a species is a result of historical changes in population size and extent of distribution related to climatic and environmental factors and contemporary processes of dispersal and gene ...
Phenotypic transitions, such as trait gain or loss, are predicted to carry evolutionary consequences for the genes that control their development. For example, trait losses can result in molecular decay of the...
Black sparrowhawks (Accipiter melanoleucus) recently colonised the Cape Peninsula, South Africa, where the species faces competition for their nest sites from Egyptian geese (Alopochen aegyptiaca) which frequentl...
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