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Local adaptation can drive the divergence of populations but identification of the traits under selection remains a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Reciprocal transplant experiments are ideal tests of...
Seamount-associated faunas are often considered highly endemic but isolation and diversification processes leading to such endemism have been poorly documented at those depths. Likewise, species delimitation a...
Many marine meiofaunal species are reported to have wide distributions, which creates a paradox considering their hypothesized low dispersal abilities. Correlated with this paradox is an especially high taxono...
Climatic oscillations throughout the Quaternary had profound effects on temperate biodiversity, but the extent of Quaternary climate change was more severe in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere than ...
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is considered to be a major force driving the evolutionary history of prokaryotes. HGT is widespread in prokaryotes, contributing to the genomic repertoire of prokaryotic organis...
Delimiting genetic units is useful to enhance taxonomic discovery and is often the first step toward understanding evolutionary mechanisms generating diversification. The six species within the Rhinella crucifer ...
Over the last ten years we have seen great efforts focused on revising amphibian systematics. Phylogenetic reconstructions derived from DNA sequence data have played a central role in these revisionary studies...
The original article was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:27
Zona pellucida domain-containing proteins (ZP proteins) have been identified as the principle constituents of the egg coat (EC) of diverse metazoan taxa, including jawed vertebrates, urochordates and molluscs ...
The correlation of genetic distances between pairs of protein sequence alignments has been used to infer protein-protein interactions. It has been suggested that these correlations are based on the signal of c...
HIV-1 derives from multiple independent transfers of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) strains from chimpanzees to human populations. We hypothesized that human populations in west central Africa may have be...
Ultraconserved elements of DNA have been identified in vertebrate and invertebrate genomes. These elements have been found to have diverse functions, including enhancer activities in developmental processes. T...
Organisms may respond to environmental change by means of genetic adaptation, phenotypic plasticity or both, which may result in genotype-environment interactions (G x E) if genotypes differ in their phenotypi...
A Southwest Asian origin and dispersal to North Africa in the Early Upper Palaeolithic era has been inferred in previous studies for mtDNA haplogroups M1 and U6. Both haplogroups have been proposed to show sim...
Baker’s law predicts that self-incompatible plant species are generally poor colonizers because their mating system requires a high diversity of genetically differentiated individuals and thus self-compatibili...
Animals often display phenotypic plasticity in morphologies and behaviors that result in distinct adaptations to fluctuating seasonal environments. The butterfly Bicyclus anynana has two seasonal forms, wet and d...
Somatostatin and its related neuroendocrine peptides have a wide variety of physiological functions that are mediated by five somatostatin receptors with gene names SSTR1-5 in mammals. To resolve their evolution ...
The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes are one of the most important genetic systems in the vertebrate immune response. The diversity of MHC genes may directly influence the survival of individuals a...
The broadly accepted pattern of rapid evolution of reproductive genes is primarily based on studies of animal systems, although several examples of rapidly evolving genes involved in reproduction are found in ...
Cassava (Manihot esculenta) is a major food source for over 200 million sub-Saharan Africans. Unfortunately, its cultivation is severely hampered by cassava mosaic disease (CMD). Caused by a complex of biparti...
The class A scavenger receptors are a subclass of a diverse family of proteins defined based on their ability to bind modified lipoproteins. The 5 members of this family are strikingly variable in their protei...
In 2004, we discovered an atypical protein in metagenomic data from marine thaumarchaeotal species. This protein, referred as DnaJ-Fer, is composed of a J domain fused to a Ferredoxin (Fer) domain. Surprisingl...
45S rDNA sites are the most widely documented chromosomal regions in eukaryotes. The analysis of the distribution of these sites along the chromosome in several genera has suggested some bias in their distribu...
While research on the impact of global climate change (GCC) on ecosystems and species is flourishing, a fundamental component of biodiversity – molecular variation – has not yet received its due attention in s...
Fires have been widespread over the last 250 million years, peaking 60−125 million years ago (Ma), and might therefore have played a key role in the evolution of Angiosperms. Yet it is commonly believed that f...
Comparing the covariation patterns of populations or species is a basic step in the evolutionary analysis of quantitative traits. Here I propose a new, simple method to make this comparison in two population s...
Plant parasitic nematodes are unusual Metazoans as they are equipped with genes that allow for symbiont-independent degradation of plant cell walls. Among the cell wall-degrading enzymes, glycoside hydrolase f...
Cyanobacteria are photoautotrophic prokaryotes with wide variations in genome sizes and ecological habitats. Peroxiredoxin (PRX) is an important protein that plays essential roles in protecting own cells again...
Over the last 6 decades, rodent Plasmodium species have become key model systems for understanding the basic biology of malaria parasites. Cell and molecular parasitology have made much progress in identifying ge...
While search costs have long been understood to affect the evolution of female preference, other costs associated with mating have been the focus of much less attention. Here I consider a novel mate choice cos...
The symbiosis between reef-building corals and photosynthetic dinoflagellates (Symbiodinium) is an integral part of the coral reef ecosystem, as corals are dependent on Symbiodinium for the majority of their ener...
The sequencing of the genome of the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum revealed an unusual expansion of the miRNA machinery, with two argonaute-1, two dicer-1 and four pasha gene copies. In this report, we have undert...
The gamma-gliadins are considered to be the oldest of the gliadin family of storage proteins in Aegilops/Triticum. However, the expansion of this multigene family has not been studied in an evolutionary perspecti...
Chrysanthemyl diphosphate synthase (CDS) is a key enzyme in biosynthetic pathways producing pyrethrins and irregular monoterpenes. These compounds are confined to plants of the tribe Anthemideae of the Asterac...
Indirect reciprocity is a mechanism for cooperation in social dilemma situations. In indirect reciprocity, an individual is motivated to help another to acquire a good reputation and receive help from others a...
Adaptive radiation is the process by which a single ancestral species diversifies into many descendants adapted to exploit a wide range of habitats. The appearance of ecological opportunities, or the colonisat...
Recent evidence supports the proposal that the observed diversity of animal body plans has been produced through alterations to the complexity of the regulatory genome rather than increases in the protein-codi...
The European trout (Salmo trutta species complex) occurs across a very wide altitudinal range from lowland rivers to alpine streams. Historically, the major European river systems contained different, evolutionar...
Marine phytoplankton drift passively with currents, have high dispersal potentials and can be comprised of morphologically cryptic species. To examine molecular subdivision in the marine diatom Thalassiosira rotu...
In the Calvin cycle of eubacteria, the dephosphorylations of both fructose-1, 6-bisphosphate (FBP) and sedoheptulose-1, 7-bisphosphate (SBP) are catalyzed by the same bifunctional enzyme: fructose-1, 6-bisphos...
Small, isolated populations often experience loss of genetic variation due to random genetic drift. Unlike neutral or nearly neutral markers (such as mitochondrial genes or microsatellites), major histocompati...
Gene duplications play an important role in the evolution of functional protein diversity. Some models of duplicate gene evolution predict complex forms of paralog divergence; orthologous proteins may diverge ...
Mangroves are ecologically important and highly threatened forest communities. Observational and genetic evidence has confirmed the long distance dispersal capacity of water-dispersed mangrove seeds, but less ...
Numerous recent studies have shown that resident symbiotic microorganisms of insects play a fundamental role in host ecology and evolution. The lepidopteran pest, African armyworm (Spodoptera exempta), is a highl...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2013 13:6
The Visayan Tarictic Hornbill (Penelopides panini) and the Walden’s Hornbill (Aceros waldeni) are two threatened hornbill species endemic to the western islands of the Visayas that constitute - between Luzon and ...
Most fishes possess two paralogs for myostatin, a muscle growth inhibitor, while salmonids are presumed to have four: mstn1a, mstn1b, mstn2a and mstn2b, a pseudogene. The mechanisms responsible for preserving the...
The Batrachoididae family is a group of marine teleosts that includes several species with more complicated physiological characteristics, such as their excretory, reproductive, cardiovascular and respiratory ...
The exponential growth of the number of fully sequenced genomes at varying taxonomic closeness allows one to characterize transcriptional regulation using comparative-genomics analysis instead of time-consumin...
The maintenance of biological systems requires plasticity and robustness. The function of the ecdysone receptor, a heterodimer composed of the nuclear receptors ECR (NR1H1) and USP (NR2B4), was maintained in i...
Among multigene families, ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes are the most frequently studied and have been explored as cytogenetic markers to study the evolutionary history of karyotypes among animals and plants. In t...
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