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To understand the ecological and evolutionary consequences of species interactions in food webs necessitates that interactions are properly identified. Genetic analyses suggest that many supposedly generalist ...
Cryptic genetic variation (CGV) is considered to facilitate phenotypic evolution by producing visible variations in response to changes in the internal and/or external environment. Several mechanisms enabling ...
Obligate parthenogenesis is relatively rare in animals. Still, in some groups it is quite common and has evolved and persisted multiple times. These groups may provide important clues to help solve the ‘parado...
Gammarus minus, a freshwater amphipod living in the cave and surface streams in the eastern USA, is a premier candidate for studying the evolution of troglomorphic traits such as pigmentation loss, elongated appe...
Strongylocentrotid sea urchins have a long tradition as model organisms for studying many fundamental processes in biology including fertilization, embryology, development and genome regulation but the phyloge...
The Ran GTPase Activating Protein 2 (RanGAP2) was first described as a regulator of mitosis and nucleocytoplasmic trafficking. It was then found to interact with the Coiled-Coil domain of the Rx and GPA2 resis...
Many important toxins and antibiotics are produced by non-ribosomal biosynthetic pathways. Microcystins are a chemically diverse family of potent peptide toxins and the end-products of a hybrid NRPS and PKS se...
The ability to produce physiologically critical LC-PUFA from dietary fatty acids differs greatly among teleost species, and is dependent on the possession and expression of fatty acyl desaturase and elongase g...
Cymbidium orchids, including some 50 species, are the famous flowers, and they possess high commercial value in the floricultural industry. Furthermore, the values of different orchids are great differences. Howe...
Mitochondrial genes are among the most commonly used markers in studies of species’ phylogeography and to draw conclusions about taxonomy. The Hyles euphorbiae complex (HEC) comprises six distinct mitochondrial l...
Gibbons (Hylobatidae) are the most diverse group of living apes. They exist as geographically-contiguous species which diverged more rapidly than did their close relatives, the great apes (Hominidae). Of the f...
Laboratory studies show that the components of sexual selection (e.g., mate choice and intrasexual competition) can profoundly affect the development and fitness of offspring. Less is known, however, about the...
New powerful biogeographic methods have focused attention on long-standing hypotheses regarding the influence of the break-up of Gondwana on the biogeography of Southern Hemisphere plant groups. Studies to dat...
Much of the current research in the growing field of evolutionary development concerns relating developmental pathways to large-scale patterns of morphological evolution, with developmental constraints on vari...
Anguillicola crassus, a swim bladder nematode naturally parasitizing the Japanese eel, was introduced about 30 years ago from East Asia into Europe where it colonized almost all populations of the European eel. W...
Early evolutionary theories of aging predict that populations which experience low extrinsic mortality evolve a retarded onset of senescence. Experimental support for this theory in vertebrates is scarce, in p...
The Hippo pathway controls growth by mediating cell proliferation and apoptosis. Dysregulation of Hippo signaling causes abnormal proliferation in both healthy and cancerous cells. The Hippo pathway receives i...
Many species exhibit geographic variation in sexual signals, and divergence in these traits may lead to speciation. Sexual signals may diverge due to differences in ecology if the environment constrains signal...
The diversification of organisms with a parasitic lifestyle is often tightly linked to the evolution of their host associations. If a tight host association exists, closely related species tend to attack close...
Gene duplicates often exhibit asymmetric rates of molecular evolution in their early evolutionary existence. This asymmetry in rates is thought to signify the maintenance of the ancestral function by one copy ...
The extant Gnetales include three monotypic families, namely, Ephedraceae (Ephedra), Gnetaceae (Gnetum), and Welwitschiaceae (Welwitschia), all of which possess compound female cones that comprise a main axis and...
Virulence is often coupled with replicative fitness of viruses in vertebrate systems, yet the relationship between virulence and fitness of arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) in invertebrates has not been e...
The enzyme family Quiescin Sulfhydryl Oxidase (QSOX) is defined by the presence of an amino-terminal thioredoxin-fold (Trx) domain and a carboxy-terminal Erv family sulfhydryl oxidase domain. QSOX enzymes, whi...
The S-domain serine/threonine receptor-like kinases (SRLKs) comprise one of the largest and most rapidly expanding subfamilies in the plant receptor-like/Pelle kinase (RLKs) family. The founding member of this...
Mutations that increase gene expression are predicted to increase energy allocation to transcription, translation and protein function. Despite an appreciation that energetic tradeoffs may constrain adaptation...
The relationships between North Atlantic and North Pacific faunas through times have been controlled by the variation of hydrographic circumstances in the intervening Arctic Ocean and Bering Strait. We address...
Previously, we showed that adaptive substitutions in one of the three promoters of the bacteriophage ϕX174 improved fitness at high-temperature by decreasing transcript levels three- to four-fold. To understan...
Many factors have been identified as correlates of the rate of molecular evolution, such as body size and generation length. Analysis of many molecular phylogenies has also revealed correlations between substi...
Adaptation, which induces differentiation between populations in relation to environmental conditions, can initiate divergence. The balance between gene flow and selection determines the maintenance of such a ...
The Southeast Asian deletion (--SEA) is the most commonly observed mutation among diverse α-thalassemia alleles in Southeast Asia and South China. It is generally argued that mutation --SEA, like other variants c...
The arylamine N-acetyltransferases (NATs) are a unique family of enzymes widely distributed in nature that play a crucial role in the detoxification of aromatic amine xenobiotics. Considering the temporal chan...
The editors of BMC Evolutionary Biology would like to thank all our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in Volume 12 (2012).
Acquisition of upright posture in evolution has been argued to facilitate manual laterality in primates. Owing to the high variety of postural habits marsupials can serve as a suitable model to test whether th...
Sirtuins genes are widely distributed by evolution and have been found in eubacteria, archaea and eukaryotes. While prokaryotic and archeal species usually have one or two sirtuin homologs, in humans as well a...
The currently recognized species richness of South American salamanders is surprisingly low compared to North and Central America. In part, this low richness may be due to the salamanders being a recent arriva...
The Neotropics are exceptionally diverse, containing roughly one third of all extant bird species on Earth. This remarkable species richness is thought to be a consequence of processes associated with both And...
Most eukaryotic genes are interrupted by spliceosomal introns. The evolution of exon-intron structure remains mysterious despite rapid advance in genome sequencing technique. In this work, a novel approach is ...
The current San and Khoe populations are remnant groups of a much larger and widely dispersed population of hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, who had exclusive occupation of southern Africa before the influx ...
Talpids include forms with different degree of fossoriality, with major specializations in the humerus in the case of the fully fossorial moles. We studied the humeral microanatomy of eleven extant and eight e...
The CRISPR/Cas system is known to act as an adaptive and heritable immune system in Eubacteria and Archaea. Immunity is encoded in an array of spacer sequences. Each spacer can provide specific immunity to inv...
One of the most widely accepted ecomorphological relationships in vertebrates is the negative correlation between intestinal length and proportion of animal prey in diet. While many fish groups exhibit this ge...
Visual perception is initiated in the photoreceptor cells of the retina via the phototransduction system. This system has shown marked evolution during mammalian divergence in such complex attributes as activa...
Beneficial mutations play an essential role in bacterial adaptation, yet little is known about their fitness effects across genetic backgrounds and environments. One prominent example of bacterial adaptation i...
ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (ADP-Glc PPase) catalyzes the first committed step in the synthesis of glycogen in bacteria and starch in algae and plants. In oxygenic photosynthetic organisms, ADP-Glc PPase is ...
Heat-shock proteins of the 70 kDa family (Hsp70s) are essential chaperones required for key cellular functions. In eukaryotes, four subfamilies can be distinguished according to their function and localisation...
Parasitic plants, represented by several thousand species of angiosperms, use modified structures known as haustoria to tap into photosynthetic host plants and extract nutrients and water. As a result of their...
Proteins are composed of a combination of discrete, well-defined, sequence domains, associated with specific functions that have arisen at different times during evolutionary history. The emergence of novel do...
The importance of historical contingency in determining the potential of viral populations to evolve has been largely unappreciated. Identifying the constraints imposed by past adaptations is, however, of impo...
The eyes of giant and colossal squid are among the largest eyes in the history of life. It was recently proposed that sperm whale predation is the main driver of eye size evolution in giant squid, on the basis...
The multispecies coalescent model has become popular in recent years as a framework to infer a species phylogeny from multilocus genetic data collected from multiple individuals. The model assumes that speciat...
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