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Histone lysine methylation modifies chromatin structure and regulates eukaryotic gene transcription and a variety of developmental and physiological processes. SET domain proteins are lysine methyltransferases...
Carassius gibelio, a cyprinid fish from Eurasia, has the ability to reproduce both sexually and asexually. This fish is also known as an invasive species which colonized almost all continental Europe, most likely...
Fine-scale or spatial genetic structure (SGS) is one of the key genetic characteristics of plant populations. Several evolutionary and ecological processes and population characteristics influence the level of...
Host plants exert considerable selective pressure on aphids because the plants constitute their feeding, mating and oviposition sites. Therefore, host specialisation in aphids evolves through selection of the ...
Interspecific hybridization occurs in every eukaryotic kingdom. While hybrid progeny are frequently at a selective disadvantage, in some instances their increased genome size and complexity may result in great...
The study of speciation and maintenance of species barriers is at the core of evolutionary biology. During speciation the genome of one population becomes separated from other populations of the same species, ...
To maximize their fitness, parents are assumed to allocate their resources optimally between number and size of offspring. Although this fundamental life-history trade-off has been subject to long standing int...
The maintenance of sexuality is a classic problem in evolutionary biology because it is a less efficient mode of reproduction compared with asexuality; however, many organisms are sexual. Theoretical work sugg...
Sexual reproduction is common in eukaryotic microorganisms, with few species reproducing exclusively asexually. However, in some organisms, such as fungi, asexual reproduction alternates with episodic sexual r...
Although evolutionary models of cooperation build on the intuition that costs of the donor and benefits to the receiver are the most general fundamental parameters, it is largely unknown how they affect the de...
Rates of molecular evolution are known to vary across taxa and among genes, and this requires rate calibration for each specific dataset based on external information. Calibration is sensitive to evolutionary ...
Cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) are a group of adapted marine mammals with an enigmatic history of transition from terrestrial to full aquatic habitat and rapid radiation in waters around the world....
For wide-ranging species, intraspecific variation can occur as a result of reproductive isolation from local adaptive differences or from physical barriers to movement. Cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii), a w...
Optimality models of evolution, which ignore genetic details and focus on natural selection, are widely used but sometimes criticized as oversimplifications. Their utility for quantitatively predicting phenoty...
Xenarthra (sloths, armadillos and anteaters) represent one of four currently recognized Eutherian mammal supraorders. Some phylogenomic studies point to the possibility of Xenarthra being at the base of the Eu...
House mice (Mus musculus) are commensals of humans and therefore their phylogeography can reflect human colonization and settlement patterns. Previous studies have linked the distribution of house mouse mitochond...
For a long time the presence of respiratory proteins in most insects has been considered unnecessary. However, in recent years it has become evident that globins belong to the standard repertoire of the insect...
A female preference for intense sexual visual signals is widespread in animals. Although the preferences for a signal per se and for the intensity of the signal were often regarded to have the identical origin, n...
Cardiolipin (CL) is an important component in mitochondrial inner and bacterial membranes. Its appearance in these two biomembranes has been considered as evidence of the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria. ...
Pseudoscorpions are chelicerates and have historically been viewed as being most closely related to solifuges, harvestmen, and scorpions. No mitochondrial genomes of pseudoscorpions have been published, but th...
Hydrocharitaceae is a fully aquatic monocot family, consists of 18 genera with approximately 120 species. The family includes both fresh and marine aquatics and exhibits great diversity in form and habit inclu...
Morphostasis of traits in different species is necessary for reconstructing the evolutionary history of complex characters. Studies that place these species into a molecular phylogenetic context test hypothese...
Although the vertebrate skeleton arose in the sea 500 million years ago, our understanding of the molecular fingerprints of chondrocytes and osteoblasts may be biased because it is informed mainly by research ...
Baetis harrisoni Barnard is a mayfly frequently encountered in river studies across Africa, but the external morphological features used for identifying nymphs have been observed to vary subtly between different ...
In the laboratory, the Drosophila melanogaster heat shock protein Hsp90 can buffer the phenotypic effects of genetic variation. Laboratory experiments either manipulate Hsp90 activity pharmacologically, or they i...
The trans-Atlantic slave trade dramatically changed the demographic makeup of the New World, with varying regions of the African coast exploited differently over roughly a 400 year period. When compared to the...
Robust species delimitations are fundamental for conservation, evolutionary, and systematic studies, but they can be difficult to estimate, particularly in rapid and recent radiations. The consensus that speci...
Plasmodium vivax is the most widely distributed human malaria parasite outside of Africa, and its range extends well into the temperate zones. Previous studies provided evidence for vivax population differentiati...
The origin and modification of novel traits are important aspects of biological diversification. Studies combining concepts and approaches of developmental genetics and evolutionary biology have uncovered many...
In mammals, males typically have shorter lives than females. This difference is thought to be due to behavioural traits which enhance competitive abilities, and hence male reproductive success, but impair surv...
Oxygen transport in the hemolymph of many arthropod species is facilitated by large copper-proteins referred to as hemocyanins. Arthropod hemocyanins are hexamers or oligomers of hexamers, which are characteri...
One of the big remaining challenges in evolutionary biology is to understand the evolution and maintenance of meiotic recombination. As recombination breaks down successful genotypes, it should be selected for...
The Ampelopsis clade (Ampelopsis and its close allies) of the grape family Vitaceae contains ca. 43 species disjunctly distributed in Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and Australia, and is a ra...
The degree to which loud-calls in nonhuman primates can be used as a reliable taxonomic tool is the subject of ongoing debate. A recent study on crested gibbons showed that these species can be well distinguis...
Seed storage proteins are a major source of dietary protein, and the content of such proteins determines both the quantity and quality of crop yield. Significantly, examination of the protein content in the se...
The pronounced morphological conservatism within Tarentola geckos contrasted with a high genetic variation in North Africa, has led to the hypothesis that this group could represent a cryptic species complex, a c...
The entire evolutionary history of life can be studied using myriad sequences generated by genomic research. This includes the appearance of the first cells and of superkingdoms Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya....
Cyclical parthenogenetic water fleas of the genus Daphnia have become a prominent model organism in ecology and evolution. In the past, analyses of their population structure have been limited by the prevailing u...
Host-parasite coevolution can lead to local adaptation of either parasite or host if there is specificity (GxG interactions) and asymmetric evolutionary potential between host and parasite. This has been demon...
One of the main issues of molecular evolution is to divulge the principles in dictating the evolutionary rate differences among various gene classes. Immunological genes have received considerable attention in...
Cave animals converge evolutionarily on a suite of troglomorphic traits, the best known of which are eyelessness and depigmentation. We studied 11 cave and 10 surface populations of Astyanax mexicanus in order to...
Comparative genomics can inform us about the processes of mutation and selection across diverse taxa. Among seed plants, gymnosperms have been lacking in genomic comparisons. Recent EST and full-length cDNA co...
Elucidating the selective and neutral forces underlying molecular evolution is fundamental to understanding the genetic basis of adaptation. Plants have evolved a suite of adaptive responses to cope with varia...
Protein domains are the structural, functional and evolutionary units of the protein. Protein domain architectures are the linear arrangements of domain(s) in individual proteins. Although the evolutionary his...
Sex determining mechanisms are evolutionarily labile and related species often use different primary signals and gene regulatory networks. This is well illustrated by the sex determining cascade of Drosophila fru...
Recent studies of the tick saliva transcriptome have revealed the profound role of salivary proteins in blood feeding. Kunitz/BPTI proteins are abundant in the salivary glands of ticks and perform multiple fun...
The coevolution of male traits and female mate preferences has led to the elaboration and diversification of sexually selected traits; however the mechanisms that mediate trait-preference coevolution are large...
Species complexes or aggregates consist of a set of closely related species often of different ploidy levels, whose relationships are difficult to reconstruct. The N Hemisphere Achillea millefolium aggregate exhi...
The interaction between insects and plants takes myriad forms in the generation of spectacular diversity. In this association a species host range is fundamental and often measured using an estimate of phyloge...
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