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By segregating somatic and germinal functions into large, compound macronuclei and small diploid micronuclei, respectively, ciliates can explore sexuality in ways other eukaryotes cannot. Sex, for instance, is...
Biogeographers seek to understand the influences of global climate shifts and geologic changes to the landscape on the ecology and evolution of organisms. Across both longer and shorter timeframes, the western...
Extreme environments can impose strong ecological and evolutionary pressures at a local level. Ectotherms are particularly sensitive to low-temperature environments, which can result in a reduced activity peri...
Complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome analyses have greatly improved the phylogeny and phylogeography of human mtDNA. Human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup U6 has been considered as a molecular signal of a Pa...
The development of pesticide resistance represents a global challenge to food production. Specifically for the Atlantic salmon aquaculture industry, parasitic sea lice and their developing resistance to delous...
Some species of water frogs originated from hybridization between different species. Such hybrid populations have a particular reproduction system called hybridogenesis. In this paper we consider the two species
Competition between spermatozoa from rival males for success in fertilization (i.e., sperm competition) is an important selective force driving the evolution of male reproductive traits and promoting positive ...
Many microbial phenotypes are the product of cooperative interactions among cells, but their putative fitness benefits are often not well understood. In the cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum, unicellul...
The degree of postcopulatory sexual selection, comprising variable degrees of sperm competition and cryptic female choice, is an important evolutionary force to influence sperm form and function. Here we inves...
Starch is the main source of carbon storage in the Archaeplastida. The starch biosynthesis pathway (sbp) emerged from cytosolic glycogen metabolism shortly after plastid endosymbiosis and was redirected to the pl...
The forelimb-specific gene tbx5 is highly conserved and essential for the development of forelimbs in zebrafish, mice, and humans. Amongst birds, a single order, Dinornithiformes, comprising the extinct wingless ...
The aquatic flowering-plant family Hydatellaceae has a classic Gondwanan distribution, as it is found in Australia, India and New Zealand. To shed light on the biogeographic history of this apparently ancient ...
Molecular clock methodologies allow for the estimation of divergence times across a variety of organisms; this can be particularly useful for groups lacking robust fossil histories, such as microbial eukaryote...
Phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL; E.C.4.3.1.5) is a key enzyme of the phenylpropanoid pathway in plant development, and it catalyses the deamination of phenylalanine to trans-cinnamic acid, leading to the prod...
Most previous studies of morphological and molecular data have consistently supported the monophyly of the true water bugs (Hemiptera: Nepomorpha). An exception is a recent study by Hua et al. (BMC Evol Biol 9...
Transgenic constructs intended to be stably established at high frequencies in wild populations have been demonstrated to “drive” from low frequencies in experimental insect populations. Linking such populatio...
Divergence between populations in reproductively important features is often vital for speciation. Many studies attempt to identify the cause of population differentiation in phenotype through the study of a s...
Synonymous codon usage can affect many cellular processes, particularly those associated with translation such as polypeptide elongation and folding, mRNA degradation/stability, and splicing. Highly expressed ...
Identifying the sources of variation in mating interactions between males and females is important because this variation influences the strength and/or the direction of sexual selection that populations exper...
The Malili Lakes system in central Sulawesi (Indonesia) is a hotspot of freshwater biodiversity in the Wallacea, characterized by endemic species flocks like the sailfin silversides (Teleostei: Atherinomorpha:...
Army ants are dominant invertebrate predators in tropical and subtropical terrestrial ecosystems. Their close relatives within the dorylomorph group of ants are also highly specialized predators, although much...
The Indo-Pacific region has the largest number of seagrass species worldwide and this region is considered as the origin of the Hydrocharitaceae. Halophila ovalis and its closely-related species belonging to the ...
Recent work has shown that Fusarium species and genotypes most commonly associated with human infections, particularly of the cornea (mycotic keratitis), are the same as those most commonly isolated from plumbing...
Semelparity and iteroparity are considered to be distinct and alternative life-history strategies, where semelparity is characterized by a single, fatal reproductive episode, and iteroparity by repeated reprod...
Determining the presence or absence of gene flow between populations is the target of some statistical methods in population genetics. Until recently, these methods either avoided the use of recombining genes,...
The pantropical genus Bauhinia, along with the northern temperate Cercis and several tropical genera, bear bilobate, bifoliolate, or sometimes unifoliolate leaves, which constitute the tribe Cercideae as sister t...
Many studies have found functional RNA secondary structures are selectively conserved among species. But, the effect of RNA structure selection on coding sequence evolution remains unknown. To address this pro...
Reactive carbonyl species (RCS), such as methylglyoxal (MG) and glyoxal (GO), are synthesized as toxic metabolites in living systems. Mechanisms of RCS detoxification include the glutathione (GSH)-dependent sy...
Plasticity, i.e. non-heritable morphological variation, enables organisms to modify the shape of their skeletal tissues in response to varying environmental stimuli. Plastic variation may also allow individual...
Raphidioptera (snakeflies) is a holometabolous order of the superorder Neuropterida characterized by the narrowly elongate adult prothorax and the long female ovipositor. Mesozoic snakeflies were markedly more...
Mangroves are key components of coastal ecosystems in tropical and subtropical regions worldwide. However, the patterns and mechanisms of modern distribution of mangroves are still not well understood. Histori...
Partitioning involves estimating independent models of molecular evolution for different subsets of sites in a sequence alignment, and has been shown to improve phylogenetic inference. Current methods for esti...
Polyandry is a common mating strategy in animals, increasing female fitness through direct (material) and indirect (genetic) benefits. Most theories about the benefits of polyandry come from studies of terrest...
In natural communities of cyclical parthenogens, rapid response to environmental change is enabled by switching between two reproduction modes. While long periods of asexual reproduction allow some clones to o...
In most species, males compete to gain both matings (via pre-copulatory competition) and fertilizations (via post-copulatory competition) to maximize their reproductive success. However, the quantity of resour...
Protein sites evolve at different rates due to functional and biophysical constraints. It is usually considered that the main structural determinant of a site’s rate of evolution is its Relative Solvent Access...
Manchurochelys manchoukuoensis is an emblematic turtle from the Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning, China, a geological rock unit that is famous for yielding perfectly preserved skeletons of fossil vertebrat...
Polytypism in aposematic species is unlikely according to theory, but commonly seen in nature. Ranitomeya imitator is a poison frog species exhibiting polytypic mimicry of three congeneric model species (R. fanta...
miRNAs are a major class of regulators of gene expression in metazoans. By targeting cognate mRNAs, miRNAs are involved in regulating most, if not all, biological processes in different cell and tissue types. ...
Tubifex tubifex is a widespread annelid characterized by considerable variability in its taxonomic characteristics and by a mixed reproductive strategy, with both parthenogenesis and biparental reproduction. In a...
Bushbabies (Galagidae) are among the most morphologically cryptic of all primates and their diversity and relationships are some of the most longstanding problems in primatology. Our knowledge of galagid evolu...
Understanding the demographic history of a population is critical to conservation and to our broader understanding of evolutionary processes. For many tropical large mammals, however, this aim is confounded by...
As part of BioMed Central’s open science mission, we are pleased to announce that two of our journals have integrated with the open data repository Dryad. Authors submitting their research to either BMC Ecology o...
Cytochrome P450 CYP2C19 metabolizes a wide range of pharmacologically active substances and a relatively small number of naturally occurring environmental toxins. Poor activity alleles of CYP2C19 are very frequen...
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has been suggested as the mechanism by which various plant parasitic nematode species have obtained genes important in parasitism. In particular, cellulase genes have been acquir...
Pedigree reconstruction using genetic analysis provides a useful means to estimate fundamental population biology parameters relating to population demography, trait heritability and individual fitness when co...
As it becomes increasingly possible to obtain DNA sequences of orthologous genes from diverse sets of taxa, species trees are frequently being inferred from multilocus data. However, the behavior of many metho...
Ubiquilins are proteins that function as ubiquitin receptors in eukaryotes. Mutations in two ubiquilin-encoding genes have been linked to the genesis of neurodegenerative diseases. However, ubiquilin functions...
The original article was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2013 13:36
Hybridization, the interbreeding of diagnosably divergent species, is a major focus in evolutionary studies. Eels, both from North America and Europe migrate through the Atlantic to mate in a vast, overlapping...
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