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Population bottlenecks can lead to a loss of variation at disease resistance loci, which could have important consequences for the ability of populations to adapt to pathogen pressure. Alternatively, current o...
Four of the five species of Telopea (Proteaceae) are distributed in a latitudinal replacement pattern on the south-eastern Australian mainland. In similar circumstances, a simple allopatric speciation model that ...
Bdelloid rotifers are microscopic animals that have apparently survived without sex for millions of years and are able to survive desiccation at all life stages through a process called anhydrobiosis. Both of ...
Short chain dehydrogenases/reductases (SDR) are NAD(P)(H)-dependent oxidoreductases with a highly conserved 3D structure and of an early origin, which has allowed them to diverge into several families and enzy...
The range of potential morphologies resulting from evolution is limited by complex interacting processes, ranging from development to function. Quantifying these interactions is important for understanding ada...
The photosynthetic oxygen-evolving photo system II (PS II) produces almost the entire oxygen in the atmosphere. This unique biochemical system comprises a functional core complex that is encoded by psbA and other...
The highly improved cognitive function is the most significant change in human evolutionary history. Recently, several large-scale studies reported the evolutionary roles of DNA methylation; however, the role ...
The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is an important component of the vertebrate immune system and is frequently used to characterise adaptive variation in wild populations due to its co-evolution with p...
The Pleistocene Ice Ages were the most recent geohistorical event of major global impact, but their consequences for most parts of the Southern hemisphere remain poorly known. We investigate a radiation of ten...
Hybridization is often seen as a process dampening phenotypic differences accumulated between diverging evolutionary units. For a complex trait comprising several relatively independent modules, hybridization ...
Proteins of the mammalian PYHIN (IFI200/HIN-200) family are involved in defence against infection through recognition of foreign DNA. The family member absent in melanoma 2 (AIM2) binds cytosolic DNA via its H...
Patagonia extends for more than 84,000 km of irregular coasts is an area especially apt to evaluate how historic and contemporary processes influence the distribution and connectivity of shallow marine benthic...
Proteins convey the majority of biochemical and cellular activities in organisms. Over the course of evolution, proteins undergo normal sequence mutations as well as large scale mutations involving domain dupl...
Duplicated glucocorticoid receptors (GR) are present in most teleost fish. The evolutionary advantage of retaining two GRs is unclear, as no subtype specific functional traits or physiological roles have been ...
Disruptive selection has been documented in a growing number of natural populations. Yet, its prevalence within individual systems remains unclear. Furthermore, few studies have sought to identify the ecologic...
Adaptation of pathogens to their hosts depends critically on factors affecting pathogen reproductive rate. While pathogen reproduction is the end result of an intricate interaction between host and pathogen, t...
Chemically mediated prezygotic barriers to reproduction likely play an important role in speciation. In facultatively sexual monogonont rotifers from the Brachionus plicatilis cryptic species complex, mate recogn...
Fungus farming is an unusual life style in insects that has evolved many times in the wood boring weevils named ‘ambrosia beetles’. Multiple occurrences of this behaviour allow for a detailed comparison of the...
Hybridisation is presumed to be an important mechanism in plant speciation and a creative evolutionary force often accompanied by polyploidisation and in some cases by apomixis. The Potentilla collina group const...
Hybridization, genetic mixture of distinct populations, gives rise to myriad recombinant genotypes. Characterizing the genomic composition of hybrids is critical for studies of hybrid zone dynamics, inheritanc...
Bactrocera dorsalis s.s. is a pestiferous tephritid fruit fly distributed from Pakistan to the Pacific, with the Thai/Malay peninsula its southern limit. Sister pest taxa, B. papayae and B. philippinensis, occur ...
The marine environment is comprised of numerous divergent organisms living under similar selective pressures, often resulting in the evolution of convergent structures such as the fusiform body shape of pelagi...
Retrogenes generally do not contain introns. However, in some instances, retrogenes may recruit internal exonic sequences as introns, which is known as intronization. A retrogene that undergoes intronization i...
The glucosinolate-myrosinase system is an activated chemical defense system found in plants of the Brassicales order. Glucosinolates are stored separately from their hydrolytic enzymes, the myrosinases, in pla...
Gene duplicates have been shown to evolve at different rates. Here we further investigate the mechanism and functional underpinning of this phenomenon by assessing asymmetric evolution specifically within func...
A-Kinase Anchoring Proteins (AKAPs) are molecular scaffolding proteins mediating the assembly of multi-protein complexes containing cAMP-dependent protein kinase A (PKA), directing the kinase in discrete subce...
The Neotropical catfish family Loricariidae contains over 830 species that display extraordinary variation in jaw morphologies but nonetheless reveal little interspecific variation from a generalized diet of d...
Even with well-known sampling biases, the fossil record is key to understanding macro-evolutionary patterns. During the Miocene to Pleistocene in the Caribbean Sea, the fossil record of scleractinian corals sh...
Previous studies have proposed that mammalian toll like receptors (TLRs) have evolved under diversifying selection due to their role in pathogen detection. To determine if this is the case, we examined the ext...
Inferences concerning the evolution of invertebrate nervous systems are often hampered by the lack of a solid data base for little known but phylogenetically crucial taxa. In order to contribute to the discuss...
Duikers in the subfamily Cephalophinae are a group of tropical forest mammals believed to have first originated during the late Miocene. However, knowledge of phylogenetic relationships, pattern and timing of ...
During the evolution of transposable elements, some processes, such as ancestral polymorphisms and horizontal transfer of sequences between species, can produce incongruences in phylogenies. We investigated th...
Maternal effects are environmental influences on the phenotype of one individual that are due to the expression of genes in its mother, and are expected to evolve whenever females are better capable of assessi...
A number of studies have measured selection in nature to understand how populations adapt to their environment; however, the temporal dynamics of selection are rarely investigated. The aim of this study was to...
Fluctuating asymmetry (FA), defined as small random deviations from the ideal bilateral symmetry, has been hypothesized to increase in response to both genetic and environmental stress experienced by a populat...
Cancer, much like most human disease, is routinely studied by utilizing model organisms. Of these model organisms, mice are often dominant. However, our assumptions of functional equivalence fail to consider t...
Ommatidae is arguably the “most ancestral” extant beetle family. Recent species of this group are only found in South America and Australia, but the fossil record reveals a much broader geographical distributi...
Force, Lynch and Conery proposed the duplication-degeneration-complementation (DDC) model in which partitioning of ancestral functions (subfunctionalization) and acquisition of novel functions (neofunctionaliz...
Gene duplication and subsequent functional divergence especially expression divergence have been widely considered as main sources for evolutionary innovations. Many studies evidenced that genetic regulatory n...
The parathyroid hormone (PTH)-family consists of a group of structurally related factors that regulate calcium and bone homeostasis and are also involved in development of organs such as the heart, mammary gla...
Bacterial growth in well-mixed culture is often assumed to be an autonomous process only depending upon the external conditions under control of the investigator. However, increasingly there is awareness that ...
The Cucurbitaceae genus Trichosanthes comprises 90–100 species that occur from India to Japan and southeast to Australia and Fiji. Most species have large white or pale yellow petals with conspicuously fringed ma...
Myosin II (or Myosin Heavy Chain II, MHCII) is a family of molecular motors involved in the contractile activity of animal muscle cells but also in various other cellular processes in non-muscle cells. Previou...
Mutualistic interactions are wide-spread but the mechanisms underlying their evolutionary stability and ecological dynamics remain poorly understood. Cultivation mutualisms in which hosts consume symbionts occ...
The loss of phenotypic characters is a common feature of evolution. Cave organisms provide excellent models for investigating the underlying patterns and processes governing the evolutionary loss of phenotypic...
The thirteen species of Dryopteris in North America have long been suspected of having undergone a complicated history of reticulate evolution via allopolyploid hybridization. Various explanations for the origins...
When simple sequence repeats are integrated into functional genes, they can potentially act as evolutionary ‘tuning knobs’, supplying abundant genetic variation with minimal risk of pleiotropic deleterious eff...
Uncertainty in comparative analyses can come from at least two sources: a) phylogenetic uncertainty in the tree topology or branch lengths, and b) uncertainty due to intraspecific variation in trait values, ei...
Conserved domains are recognized as the building blocks of eukaryotic proteins. Domains showing a tendency to occur in diverse combinations (‘promiscuous’ domains) are involved in versatile architectures in pr...
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