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A fundamental assumption in animal socio-ecology is that animals compete over limited resources. This view has been challenged by the finding that individuals might cooperatively partition resources by "taking...
The Apicomplexa constitute an evolutionarily divergent phylum of protozoan pathogens responsible for widespread parasitic diseases such as malaria and toxoplasmosis. Many cellular functions in these medically ...
Understanding the evolution of cultivated barley is important for two reasons. First, the evolutionary relationships between different landraces might provide information on the spread and subsequent developme...
Genomic and pathology analysis has revealed enormous diversity in genes involved in disease, including those encoding host resistance and parasite effectors (also known in plant pathology as avirulence genes)....
Understanding the fitness consequences of inbreeding is of major importance for evolutionary and conservation biology. However, there are few studies using pedigree-based estimates of inbreeding or investigati...
The major islands of the Western Mediterranean--Corsica, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands--are continental terrenes that drifted towards their present day location following a retreat from their original pos...
Scleractinian corals are currently a focus of major interest because of their ecological importance and the uncertain fate of coral reefs in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressure. Despite this, remarka...
Efforts to solve higher-level evolutionary relationships within the class Insecta by using mitochondrial genomic data are hindered due to fast sequence evolution of several groups, most notably Hymenoptera, St...
A diversity of hypotheses have been proposed based on both morphological and molecular data to reveal phylogenetic relationships within the order Cetacea (dolphins, porpoises, and whales), and great progress h...
Interspecific variation in avian colour vision falls into two discrete classes: violet sensitive (VS) and ultraviolet sensitive (UVS). They are characterised by the spectral sensitivity of the most shortwave s...
Routine trichromatic color vision is a characteristic feature of catarrhines (humans, apes and Old World monkeys). This is enabled by L and M opsin genes arrayed on the X chromosome and an autosomal S opsin ge...
Patterns of species diversity are the result of speciation and extinction processes, and molecular phylogenetic data can provide valuable information to derive their variability through time and across clades....
Within the Coleoptera, the largest order in the animal kingdom, the exclusively herbivorous Chrysomelidae are recognized as one of the most species rich beetle families. The evolutionary processes that have fu...
Expectations of repeatedly finding associations between given genes and phenotypes have been borne out by studies of parallel evolution, especially for traits involving absence or presence of characters. Howev...
Chromosomal inversion is one of the most important mechanisms of evolution. Recent studies of comparative genomics have revealed that chromosomal inversions are abundant in the human genome. While such previou...
Teeth and tooth-like structures, together named odontodes, are repeated organs thought to share a common evolutionary origin. These structures can be found in gnathostomes at different locations along the body...
Insights into the micro-evolutionary patterns of morphological traits require an assessment of the natural variation of the trait within and between populations and closely related species. The mouse mandible ...
Most of the DNA variations found in bacterial species are in the form of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), but there is some debate regarding how much of this variation comes from mutation versus recombi...
The 5S ribosomal DNA (5S rDNA) is organized in tandem arrays with repeat units that consist of a transcribing region (5S) and a variable nontranscribed spacer (NTS), in higher eukaryotes. Until recently the 5S...
Divergent natural selection across environmental gradients has been acknowledged as a major driver of population and species divergence, however its role in the diversification of scleractinian corals remains ...
The forkhead transcription factor gene E1 (FOXE1) plays an important role in regulation of thyroid development, palate formation and hair morphogenesis in mammals. However, avian FOXE1 genes have not been charact...
The growth and development of a biological organism is reflected by its metabolic network, the evolution of which relies on the essential gene duplication mechanism. There are two current views about the evolu...
The use of mitochondrial DNA data in phylogenetics is controversial, yet studies that combine mitochondrial and nuclear DNA data (mtDNA and nucDNA) to estimate phylogeny are common, especially in vertebrates. ...
Timing the origin of human malarias has been a focus of great interest. Previous studies on the mitochondrial genome concluded that Plasmodium in primates, including those parasitic to humans, radiated relatively...
Homeobox genes are the key regulators during development, and they are in general highly conserved with only a few reported cases of rapid evolution. RHOXF2 is an X-linked homeobox gene in primates. It is highly ...
Several mechanistic models aim to explain the diversification of the multitude of endemic species on Madagascar. The island's biogeographic history probably offered numerous opportunities for secondary contact...
The tropical rain forests (TRF) of Africa are the second largest block of this biome after the Amazon and exhibit high levels of plant endemism and diversity. Two main hypotheses have been advanced to explain ...
Reconstructing the higher relationships of pulmonate gastropods has been difficult. The use of morphology is problematic due to high homoplasy. Molecular studies have suffered from low taxon sampling. Forty-ei...
Since the first report of the antiretroviral restriction factor TRIM5α in primates, several orthologs in other mammals have been described. Recent studies suggest that leporid retroviruses like RELIK, the firs...
The Asian origin of Native Americans is largely accepted. However uncertainties persist regarding the source population(s) within Asia, the divergence and arrival time(s) of the founder groups, the number of e...
During copulation, the major Afro-tropical malaria vector Anopheles gambiae s.s. transfers male accessory gland (MAG) proteins to females as a solid mass (i.e. the "mating plug"). These proteins are postulated to...
A well-known characteristic of multi-locus data is that each locus has its own phylogenetic history which may differ substantially from the overall phylogenetic history of the species. Although the possibility...
The evolutionary success of Wolbachia bacteria, infections of which are widespread in invertebrates, is largely attributed to an ability to manipulate host reproduction without imposing substantial fitness costs....
Apomixis is an intriguing trait in plants that results in maternal clones through seed reproduction. Apomixis is an elusive, but potentially revolutionary, trait for plant breeding and hybrid seed production. ...
For millennia, the southern part of the Mesopotamia has been a wetland region generated by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers before flowing into the Gulf. This area has been occupied by human communities since a...
An important objective of evolutionary biology is to understand the processes that govern phenotypic variation in natural populations. We assessed patterns of morphological and genetic divergence among coastal...
Recent research has indicated a positive association between rates of molecular evolution and diversification in a number of taxa. However debate continues concerning the universality and cause of this relatio...
Two Calyptogena clam intracellular obligate symbionts, Ca. Vesicomyosocius okutanii (Vok; C. okutanii symbiont) and Ca. Ruthia magnifica (Rma; C. magnifica symbiont), have small genomes (1.02 and 1.16 Mb, respect...
Parasites are evolutionary hitchhikers whose phylogenies often track the evolutionary history of their hosts. Incongruence in the evolutionary history of closely associated lineages can be explained through a ...
Elucidating the pattern of evolutionary changes in drug-metabolizing genes is an important subject not only for evolutionary but for biomedical research. We investigated the pattern of divergence and polymorph...
Fungi are asexually and sexually reproducing organisms that can combine the evolutionary advantages of the two reproductive modes. However, for many fungi the sexual cycle has never been observed in the field or
The family Pteropodidae comprises bats commonly known as megabats or Old World fruit bats. Molecular phylogenetic studies of pteropodids have provided considerable insight into intrafamilial relationships, but...
Studies of symmetric structures have made important contributions to evolutionary biology, for example, by using fluctuating asymmetry as a measure of developmental instability or for investigating the mechani...
Duplicated genes frequently experience asymmetric rates of sequence evolution. Relaxed selective constraints and positive selection have both been invoked to explain the observation that one paralog within a g...
Extinction and re-colonisation of local populations is common in ephemeral habitats such as temporary streams. In most cases, such population turnover leads to reduced genetic diversity within populations and ...
The most frequent case of horizontal transfer in plants involves a group I intron in the mitochondrial gene cox1, which has been acquired via some 80 separate plant-to-plant transfer events among 833 diverse angi...
With nearly 1,100 species, the fish family Characidae represents more than half of the species of Characiformes, and is a key component of Neotropical freshwater ecosystems. The composition, phylogeny, and cla...
Bacterial populations are highly successful at colonizing new habitats and adapting to changing environmental conditions, partly due to their capacity to evolve novel virulence and metabolic pathways in respon...
Understanding causes of biological diversity may be greatly enhanced by knowledge of divergence times. Strict and relaxed clock models are used in Bayesian estimation of divergence times. We examined whether: ...
Insertion sequence (IS) elements are important mediators of genome plasticity and are widespread among bacterial and archaeal genomes. The 1.88 Mbp genome of the obligate intracellular amoeba symbiont Amoebophilu...
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