Featured videos
View featured videos from across the BMC-series journals
Page 33 of 96
Understanding the underlying processes shaping spatial patterns of genetic structure in free-ranging organisms is a central topic in evolutionary biology. Here, we aim to disentangle the relative importance of...
Defining species units can be challenging, especially during the earliest stages of speciation, when phylogenetic inference and delimitation methods may be compromised by incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) or se...
Examining allelic variation of R-genes in closely related perennial species of Arabidopsis thaliana is critical to understanding how population structure and ecology interact with selection to shape the evolution...
Organisms have evolved a variety of defence mechanisms against natural enemies, which are typically used at the expense of other life history components. Induced defence mechanisms impose minor costs when path...
The synaptonemal complex (SC) is a highly conserved meiotic structure that functions to pair homologs and facilitate meiotic recombination in most eukaryotes. Five Drosophila SC proteins have been identified and ...
Strong variations are observed between and within taxonomic groups in the age of extant species and these differences can clarify factors that render species more vulnerable to extinction. Understanding the fa...
Sperm size and quality are key factors for fertilization success. There is increasing empirical evidence demonstrating that sperm form and function are influenced by selective pressures. Theoretical models pre...
The domestic pig Sus scrofa domesticus originated from the wild boar S. scrofa about 10,000 years ago. During domestication, drastic morphological, physiological, and behavioral changes developed between domestic...
The impact of historical contingency, i.e. the past evolutionary history of a population, on further adaptation is mostly unknown at both the phenotypic and genomic levels. We addressed this question using a t...
Comparative mapping of 5S and 45S rDNA by fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) technique is an excellent tool to determine cytogenetic relationships among closely related species.
The respective role and relative importance of natural selection and gene flow in the process of population divergence has been a central theme in the speciation literature. A previous study presented conclusi...
Bone-devouring Osedax worms were described over a decade ago from deep-sea whale falls. The gutless females (and in one species also the males) have a unique root system that penetrates the bone and nourishes the...
Gene duplication is a major source of new genes that is thought to play an important role in phenotypic innovation. Though several mechanisms have been hypothesized to drive the functional evolution and long-t...
Accurate delimitation of plant pathogenic fungi is critical for the establishment of quarantine regulations, screening for genetic resistance to plant pathogens, and the study of ecosystem function. Concatenat...
The Indonesian island of Sulawesi has a complex geological history. It is composed of several landmasses that have arrived at a near modern configuration only in the past few million years. It is the largest i...
Flowering time is a domestication trait of Glycine max and varies in soybeans, yet, a gene for flowering time variation has not been associated with soybean domestication. GIGANTEA (GI) is a major gene involved i...
Ecological adaptation to host taxa is thought to result in mistletoe speciation via race formation. However, historical and ecological factors could also contribute to explain genetic structuring particularly ...
Many species contain evolutionarily distinct groups that are genetically highly differentiated but morphologically difficult to distinguish (i.e., cryptic species). The presence of cryptic species poses signif...
Studying patterns of introgression can illuminate the role of hybridization in speciation, and help guide decisions relevant to the conservation of rare taxa. Vipera magnifica and Vipera orlovi are small vipers t...
Brain-expressed proteins that have undergone functional change during human evolution may contribute to human cognitive capacities, and may also leave us vulnerable to specifically human diseases, such as schi...
Hoplolaimina plant-parasitic nematodes (PPN) are a lineage of animals with many documented cases of horizontal gene transfer (HGT). In a recent study, we reported on three likely HGT candidate genes in the soy...
The South China landmass has been characterized by a complex geological history, including mountain lifting, climate changes, and river capture/reversal events. To determine how this complexity has influenced ...
Paleozoic scorpions (Arachnida: Scorpiones) have been widely documented from the Carboniferous Period; which hosts a remarkable assemblage of more than sixty species including both putative stem- and crown-gro...
Mixed dispersal syndromes have historically been regarded as a bet-hedging mechanism that enhances survivorship in unpredictable environments, ensuring that some propagules stay in the maternal environment whi...
Conjugative plasmids play an important role in bacterial evolution by transferring ecologically important genes within and between species. A key limit on interspecific horizontal gene transfer is plasmid host...
The Planar Cell Polarity pathway (PCP) has been described as the main feature involved in patterning cell orientation in bilaterian tissues. Recently, a similar phenomenon was revealed in cnidarians, in which ...
Inbreeding is often associated with a decrease in offspring fitness (‘inbreeding depression’). Moreover, it is generally assumed that the negative effects of inbreeding are exacerbated in stressful environment...
Oviraptorids, like many other dinosaurs, clearly had a complex pattern of skeletal growth involving numerous morphological changes. However, many ontogenetic skeletal changes in oviraptorids were previously un...
The evolutionary origin and historical demography of extant Arcto-Tertiary forest species in East Asia is still poorly understood. Here, we reconstructed the evolutionary and population demographic history of ...
Evolutionary processes, including selection and differential fitness, shape the introgression of genetic material across a hybrid zone, resulting in the exchange of some genes but not others. Differential intr...
Many vertebrate species use ultraviolet (UV) reception for such basic behaviors as foraging and mating, but many others switched to violet reception and improved their visual resolution. The respective phenoty...
Resolving the short phylogenetic branches that result from rapid evolutionary diversification often requires large numbers of loci. We collected targeted sequence capture data from 585 nuclear loci (541 ultrac...
The genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis contains five copies of the ESX gene cluster, each encoding a dedicated protein secretion system. These ESX secretion systems have been defined as a novel Type VII secreti...
Models that predict changes in the abundance and distribution of fauna under future climate change scenarios often assume that ecological niche and habitat availability are the major determinants of species’ r...
Sperm competition between rival ejaculates over the fertilization of ova typically selects for the production of large numbers of sperm. An obvious way to increase sperm production is to increase testis size, ...
Although most insect species are specialized on one or few groups of plants, there are phytophagous insects that seem to use virtually any kind of plant as food. Understanding the nature of this ability to fee...
The ParaHox genes play an integral role in the anterior-posterior (A-P) patterning of the nervous system and gut of most animals. The ParaHox cluster is an ideal system in which to study the evolution and regu...
Knowledge of the historical distribution and postglacial phylogeography and evolution of a species is important to better understand its current distribution and population structure and potential fate in the ...
Polystichum (Dryopteridaceae) is probably the third largest fern genus in the world and contains ca. 500 species. Species of Polystichum occur on all continents except Antarctica, but ...
The editors of BMC Evolutionary Biology would like to thank all our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in Volume 15 (2015).
Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is one of the most common bacterial infections in humans and this infection can lead to gastric ulcers and gastric cancer. H. pylori is one of the most ...
Secondary sexual traits and mating preferences may evolve in part because the offspring of attractive males inherit attractiveness and other genetically correlated traits such as fecundity and viability. A pro...
Neuropeptides are key players in information transfer and act as important regulators of development, growth, metabolism, and reproduction within multi-cellular animal organisms (Metazoa). These short protein-...
Darwin and the architects of the Modern Synthesis found sympatric speciation difficult to explain and suggested it is unlikely to occur. Increasingly, evidence over the past few decades suggest that sympatric ...
Nuclear genes of euglenids contain two major types of introns: conventional spliceosomal and nonconventional introns. The latter are characterized by variable non-canonical borders, RNA secondary structure tha...
Research into various aspects of coral biology has greatly increased in recent years due to anthropogenic threats to coral health including pollution, ocean warming and acidification. However, knowledge of cor...
Low complexity regions (LCRs) are a ubiquitous feature in genomes and yet their evolutionary history and functional roles are unclear. Previous studies have shown contrasting evidence in favor of both neutral ...
The hypothesis that circadian clocks confer adaptive advantage to organisms has been proposed based on its ubiquity across almost all levels of complexity and organization of life-forms. This thought has recei...
Dosage balance has been described as an important process for the retention of duplicate genes after whole genome duplication events. However, dosage balance is only a temporary mechanism for duplicate gene re...
View featured videos from across the BMC-series journals
For BMC Evolutionary Biology (former title)
2022 Citation Impact
3.4 - 2-year Impact Factor
3.6 - 5-year Impact Factor
1.061 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
0.968 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)
2023 Speed
29 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
193 days submission to accept (Median)
2023 Usage
1,882,764 downloads
3,013 Altmetric mentions
Transparency and Openness
TOP Factor score - 9
Peer Community In
BMC Ecology and Evolution welcomes submissions of pre-print manuscripts recommended by the Peer Community In (PCI) platform. The journal may use PCI reviews and recommendations for the review process if appropriate. For instructions to submit your PCI recommended article, please click here. To find out more, please read our blog.