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Early marsupial conceptuses differ markedly from those of eutherian mammals, especially during cleavage and early blastocyst stages of development. Additionally, in marsupials the zona pellucida is surrounded ...
Deep-sea hydrothermal vents provide patchy, ephemeral habitats for specialized communities of animals that depend on chemoautotrophic primary production. Unlike eastern Pacific hydrothermal vents, where popula...
Understanding the processes driving speciation in marine ecosystems remained a challenge until recently, due to the unclear nature of dispersal boundaries. However, recent evidence for marine adaptive radiatio...
Sex-ratio distorting parasites are of interest due to their effects upon host population dynamics and their potential to influence the evolution of host sex determination systems. In theory, the ability to dis...
For phylogenetic reconstructions, conflict in signal is a potential problem for tree reconstruction. For instance, molecular data from different cellular components, such as the mitochondrion and nucleus, may ...
Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are a major class of pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) expressed in the cell surface or membrane compartments of immune and non-immune cells. TLRs are encoded by a multigene famil...
Plant leucine-rich repeat receptor-like kinases (LRR-RLKs) are receptor kinases that contain LRRs in their extracellular domain. In the last 15 years, many research groups have demonstrated major roles played ...
Environmental stress can result in strong ecological and evolutionary effects on natural populations, but to what extent it drives adaptive divergence of natural populations is little explored. We used common ...
Clownfishes are colorful coral reef fishes living in groups in association with sea anemones throughout the Indo-Pacific Ocean. Within their small societies, size hierarchy determines which fish have access to...
It is widely accepted that orthologous genes have lost or gained introns throughout evolution. However, the specific mechanisms that generate these changes have proved elusive. Introns are known to affect near...
At a time when genomes are being sequenced by the hundreds, much attention has shifted from identifying genes and phenotypes to understanding the networks of interactions among genes. We developed a gene netwo...
Non-human primate communication is thought to be fundamentally different from human speech, mainly due to vast differences in vocal control. The lack of these abilities in non-human primates is especially stri...
Protein sequence evolution is constrained by the biophysics of folding and function, causing interdependence between interacting sites in the sequence. However, current site-independent models of sequence evol...
Following colonization of new habitats and subsequent selection, adaptation to environmental conditions might be expected to be rapid. In a mountain lake in Norway, Lesjaskogsvatnet, more than 20 distinct spaw...
Local Mate Competition (LMC) theory predicts a female should produce a more female-biased sex ratio if her sons compete with each other for mates. Because it provides quantitative predictions that can be exper...
Cryptic population structure can be an indicator of incipient speciation or historical processes. We investigated a previously documented deep break in the mitochondrial haplotypes of Heliconius erato chestertoni...
The rapidly increasing number of available plant genomes opens up almost unlimited prospects for biology in general and molecular phylogenetics in particular. A recent study took advantage of this data and ide...
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT), a source of genetic variation, is generally considered to facilitate hosts' adaptability to environments. However, convincing evidence supporting the significant contribution of...
Introgression of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is among the most frequently described cases of reticulate evolution. The tendency of mtDNA to cross interspecific barriers is somewhat counter-intuitive considering ...
In Drosophila, the Enhancer of split complex (E(spl)-C) comprises 11 bHLH and Bearded genes that function during Notch signaling to repress proneural identity in the developing peripheral nervous system. Comparis...
Complex life histories require adaptation of a single organism for multiple ecological niches. Transitions between life stages, however, may expose individuals to an increased risk of mortality, as the process...
The avian family Cettiidae, including the genera Cettia, Urosphena, Tesia, Abroscopus and Tickellia and Orthotomus cucullatus, has recently been proposed based on analysis of a small number of loci and species. T...
We have studied sperm structure and motility in a eusocial rodent where reproduction is typically restricted to a single male and behaviourally dominant queen. Males rarely compete for access to the queen duri...
Maize streak virus -strain A (MSV-A; Genus Mastrevirus, Family Geminiviridae), the maize-adapted strain of MSV that causes maize streak disease throughout sub-Saharan Africa, probably arose between 100 and 200 ye...
ISAV is a member of the Orthomyxoviridae family that affects salmonids with disastrous results. It was first detected in 1984 in Norway and from then on it has been reported in Canada, United States, Scotland and...
The Lysiphlebus fabarum group is a taxonomically poorly resolved complex of aphid parasitoids, presently split into three described species that comprise sexual (arrhenotokous) and asexual (thelytokous) lineages ...
Genetic, phenotypic and ecological divergence within a lineage is the result of past and ongoing evolutionary processes, which lead ultimately to diversification and speciation. Integrative analyses allow link...
Effects of polyploidisation on gene flow between natural populations are little known. Central European diploid and tetraploid populations of Arabidopsis arenosa and A. lyrata are here used to study interspecific...
The human mating system is characterized by bi-parental care and faithful monogamy is highly valued in most cultures. Marriage has evolved as a social institution and punishment for extra pair mating (EPM) or ...
Why some species are widespread while others are very restricted geographically is one of the most basic questions in biology, although it remains largely unanswered. This is particularly the case for groups o...
Understanding how freshwater assemblages have been formed and maintained is a fundamental goal in evolutionary and ecological disciplines. Here we use a historical approach to test the hypothesis of codivergen...
Matrix extracellular phosphoglycoprotein (MEPE) belongs to a family of small integrin-binding ligand N-linked glycoproteins (SIBLINGs) that play a key role in skeleton development, particularly in mineralizati...
Some of the evolutionary history of land plants has been documented based on the fossil record and a few broad-scale phylogenetic analyses, especially focusing on angiosperms and ferns. Here, we reconstructed ...
Basic helix-loop-helix and homeodomain transcription factors have been shown to specify all different neuronal cell subtypes composing the vertebrate retina. The appearance of gene paralogs of such retina-spec...
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a major laboratory model in biology. Only ten Caenorhabditis species were available in culture at the onset of this study. Many of them, like C. elegans, were mostly isolate...
Ambient light levels are often considered to drive the evolution of eye form and function. Diel activity pattern is the main mechanism controlling the visual environment of teleost reef fish, with day-active (...
First identified in fruit flies with temperature-sensitive paralysis phenotypes, the Drosophila melanogaster TipE locus encodes four voltage-gated sodium (NaV) channel auxiliary subunits. This cluster of TipE-lik...
Little is known of the biological significance and evolutionary maintenance of integrated non-retroviral RNA virus genes in eukaryotic host genomes. Here, we isolated novel filovirus-like genes from bat genome...
Many animals live in groups. One proposed reason is that grouping allows cooperative food finding. Group foraging models suggest that grouping could increase food finding rates, but that such group processes c...
Leishmania META1 has for long been a candidate molecule for involvement in virulence: META1 transcript and protein are up-regulated in metacyclic Leishmania. Yet, how META1 contributes to virulence remains unclea...
Environmental preferences and past climatic changes may determine the length of time during which a species range has contracted or expanded from refugia, thereby influencing levels of genetic diversification....
The three vertebrate pituitary glycoprotein hormones (GPH) are heterodimers of a common α and a specific β subunit. In human, they are located on different chromosomes but in a similar genomic environment. We ...
From a common ancestor with animals, the earliest fungi inherited flagellated zoospores for dispersal in water. Terrestrial fungi lost all flagellated stages and reproduce instead with nonmotile spores. Olpidium ...
The Hox family of transcription factors has a fundamental role in segmentation pathways and axial patterning of embryonic development and their clustered organization is linked with the regulatory mechanisms gove...
In nuptial gift-giving species, benefits of acquiring a mate may select for male deception by donation of worthless gifts. We investigated the effect of worthless gifts on mating success in the spider Pisaura mir...
DNA target enrichment by micro-array capture combined with high throughput sequencing technologies provides the possibility to obtain large amounts of sequence data (e.g. whole mitochondrial DNA genomes) from ...
It is a common observation in evolutionary studies that larger, more ornamented or earlier breeding individuals have higher fitness, but that body size, ornamentation or breeding time does not change despite o...
The emergence of organismal complexity has been a difficult subject for researchers because it is not readily amenable to investigation by experimental approaches. Complexity has a myriad of untested definitio...
CYCLOIDEA (CYC)-like genes have been implicated in the development of capitulum inflorescences (i.e. flowering heads) in Asteraceae, where many small flowers (florets) are packed tightly into an inflorescence tha...
Homing endonucleases (HEases) are a large and diverse group of site-specific DNAases. They reside within self-splicing introns and inteins, and promote their horizontal dissemination. In recent years, HEases h...
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