Featured videos
View featured videos from across the BMC-series journals
Page 40 of 96
Social animals have the unique capability of mounting social defenses against pathogens. Over the last decades, social immunity has been extensively studied in species with obligatory and permanent forms of so...
During the speciation process several types of isolating barriers can arise that limit gene flow between diverging populations. Studying recently isolated species can inform our understanding of how and when t...
Chromosomal rearrangements are a major driving force in shaping genome during evolution. Previous studies show that translocated genes could undergo elevated rates of evolution and recombination frequencies ar...
Genetic analyses of DNA sequences make use of an increasingly complex set of nucleotide substitution models to estimate the divergence between gene sequences. However, there is currently no way to assess the v...
RPB1, the largest subunit of RNA polymerase II, contains a highly modifiable C-terminal domain (CTD) that consists of variations of a consensus heptad repeat sequence (Y1S2P3T4S5P6S7). The consensus CTD repeat mo...
Many butterflies possess striking structures called eyespots on their wings, and several studies have sought to understand the selective forces that have shaped their evolution. Work over the last decade has s...
Non-indigenous taxa currently represent a large fraction of the species and biomass of freshwater ecosystems. The accumulation of invasive taxa in combination with other stressors in these ecosystems may alter...
MHC class I (MHCI) molecules are the key presenters of peptides generated through the intracellular pathway to CD8-positive T-cells. In fish, MHCI genes were first identified in the early 1990′s, but we still ...
The taxonomy and systematics of Salix subgenus Salix s.l. is difficult. The reliability and evolutionary implications of two important morphological characters (number of stamens, and morphology of bud scales) us...
Among living fliers (birds, bats, and insects), birds display relatively high aspect ratios, a dimensionless shape variable that distinguishes long and narrow vs. short and broad wings. Increasing aspect ratio...
Aloe vera supports a substantial global trade yet its wild origins, and explanations for its popularity over 500 related Aloe species in one of the world’s largest succulent groups, have remain...
Many ovules of Late Devonian (Famennian) seed plants have been well studied. However, because few taxa occur with anatomically preserved stems and/or petioles, the vascular system of these earliest spermatophy...
The obligate mutualism between fungus-growing ants and microbial symbionts offers excellent opportunities to study the specificity and stability of multi-species interactions. In addition to cultivating fungus...
The phylogeography of the house mouse (Mus musculus L.), an emblematic species for genetic and biomedical studies, is only partly understood, essentially because of a sampling bias towards its most peripheral pop...
Segmented body organizations are widely represented in the animal kingdom. Whether the last common bilaterian ancestor was already segmented is intensely debated. Annelids display broad morphological diversity...
Modelling genetic phenomena affecting biological traits is important for the development of agriculture as it allows breeders to predict the potential of breeding for certain traits. One such phenomenon is het...
Thelytoky, the parthenogenetic development of females, has independently evolved in several insect orders yet the study of its mechanisms has so far mostly focussed on haplodiploid Hymenoptera, while alternati...
The A Disintegrin-like and Metalloproteinase domain with Thrombospondin-1 motifs (ADAMTS) enzymes comprise 19 mammalian zinc-dependent metalloproteinases (metzincins) with homologues in a wide range of invertebra...
The bacterial genus Mycobacterium is of great interest in the medical and biotechnological fields. Despite a flood of genome sequencing and functional genomics data, significant gaps in knowledge between genome a...
Variation in the number of repeated traits, or serial homologs, has contributed greatly to animal body plan diversity. Eyespot color patterns of nymphalid butterflies, like arthropod and vertebrate limbs, are ...
Body size variation within clades of mammals is widespread, but the developmental and life-history mechanisms by which this variation is achieved are poorly understood, especially in extinct forms. An illustra...
Sperm competition imposes a strong selective pressure on males, leading to the evolution of various physiological, morphological and behavioral traits. Sperm competition can be prevented by blocking or impedin...
The editors of BMC Evolutionary Biology would like to thank all our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in Volume 14 (2014).
Two non-homologous, isofunctional enzymes catalyze the penultimate step of chlorophyll a synthesis in oxygenic photosynthetic organisms such as cyanobacteria, eukaryotic algae and land plants: the light-independe...
Long-term monitoring of the biological impacts of the radioactive pollution caused by the Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011 is required to understand what has occurred in organisms living in the pollute...
Dinoflagellates are eukaryotes with unusual cell biology and appear to rely on translational rather than transcriptional control of gene expression. The eukaryotic translation initiation factor 4E (eIF4E) play...
Model selection is a vital part of most phylogenetic analyses, and accounting for the heterogeneity in evolutionary patterns across sites is particularly important. Mixture models and partitioning are commonly...
It is conventionally accepted that the lepidopteran fossil record is significantly incomplete when compared to the fossil records of other, very diverse, extant insect orders. Such an assumption, however, has ...
Little is known about the patterns and correlates of mammal diversity gradients in Asia. In this study, we examine patterns of species distributions and phylogenetic diversity in Asia and investigate if the ob...
A key question in evolutionary biology is the relationship between species traits and their habitats. Caves offer an ideal model to test the adjustment of species to their surrounding temperature, as they prov...
The enormous diversity found in East African cichlid fishes in terms of morphology, coloration, and behavior have made them a model for the study of speciation and adaptive evolution. In particular, haplochrom...
Which factors influence the distribution patterns of morphological diversity among clades? The adaptive radiation model predicts that a clade entering new ecological niche will experience high rates of evoluti...
Climatic factors play an important role in determining species distributions and phenotypic variation of populations over geographic space. Since domestic sheep is managed under low intensive systems animals c...
Identifying the phenotypic responses to domestication remains a long-standing and important question for researchers studying its early history. The great diversity in domestic animals and plants that exists t...
Morphological divergence often increases with phylogenetic distance, thus making morphology taxonomically informative. However, transitions to asexual reproduction may complicate this relationship because asex...
Multiscale approaches for integrating submodels of various levels of biological organization into a single model became the major tool of systems biology. In this paper, we have constructed and simulated a set...
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is one of the most dangerous human pathogens, the causative agent of tuberculosis. While this pathogen is considered as extremely clonal and resistant to horizontal gene exchange, there...
Analyzing regulation of bacteriophage gene expression historically lead to establishing major paradigms of molecular biology, and may provide important medical applications in the future. Temporal regulation o...
ADAR (adenosine deaminase acting on RNA) proteins convert adenosine into inosine in double-stranded RNAs and have been shown to increase gene product diversity in a number of bilaterians, particularly mammals ...
Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) can be divided into four subspecies. Substantial phylogenetic evidence suggests that these subspecies can be grouped into two distinct lineages: a western African group that includes...
The Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti) is found in the Gulf of Guinea biodiversity hotspot located in western equatorial Africa. This subspecies is threatened by habitat fragmentation due to lo...
The mechanisms that underlie the diversification of tropical animals remain poorly understood, but new approaches that combine geo-spatial modeling with spatially explicit genetic data are providing fresh insi...
The puzzle of the selective benefits of multiple mating and multiple paternity in social insects has been a major focus of research in evolutionary biology. We examine paternity in a clade of social insects, t...
Analyzed individually, gene trees for a given taxon set tend to harbour incongruent or conflicting signals. One popular approach to deal with this circumstance is to use concatenated data. But especially in pr...
The quasispecies model refers to information carriers that undergo self-replication with errors. A quasispecies is a steady-state population of biopolymer sequence variants generated by mutations from a master...
Influenza A/H3N2 has been circulating in humans since 1968, causing considerable morbidity and mortality. Although H3N2 incidence is highly seasonal, how such seasonality contributes to global phylogeographic ...
Although the plastid genome is highly conserved across most angiosperms, multiple lineages have increased rates of structural rearrangement and nucleotide substitution. These lineages exhibit an excess of nons...
X chromosome inactivation is the transcriptional silencing of one X chromosome in the somatic cells of female mammals. In eutherian mammals (e.g. humans) one of the two X chromosomes is randomly chosen for sil...
G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) play a central role in eukaryotic signal transduction. However, the GPCR component of this signalling system, at the early origins of metazoans is not fully understood. Here...
Allopatric divergence across lineages can lead to post-zygotic reproductive isolation upon secondary contact and disrupt coevolution between mitochondrial and nuclear genomes, promoting emergence of genetic in...
View featured videos from across the BMC-series journals
For BMC Evolutionary Biology (former title)
Citation Impact 2023
Journal Impact Factor: 2.3
5-year Journal Impact Factor: 2.3
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): 0.959
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): 0.887
Speed 2023
Submission to first editorial decision (median days): 15
Submission to acceptance (median days): 193
Usage 2023
Downloads: 1,882,764
Altmetric mentions: 3,013
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.