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Leuciscinae is a subfamily belonging to the Cyprinidae fish family that is widely distributed in Circum-Mediterranean region. Many efforts have been carried out to deciphering the evolutionary history of this ...
More than 2 billion individuals worldwide suffer from helminth infections. The highest parasite burdens occur in children and helminth infection during pregnancy is a risk factor for preterm delivery and reduc...
Among bacteria and archaea, amino acid usage is correlated with habitat temperatures. In particular, protein surfaces in species thriving at higher temperatures appear to be enriched in amino acids that stabil...
Harpalinae is a species rich clade of carabid beetles with many unusual morphological forms and ecological interactions. How this diversity evolved has been difficult to reconstruct, perhaps because harpalines...
Female condition-dependent variation in mate preference may have important evolutionary implications, not only within the same population but also among populations. There are few experiments, however, on how ...
Hatching enzyme, belonging to the astacin metallo-protease family, digests egg envelope at embryo hatching. Orthologous genes of the enzyme are found in all vertebrate genomes. Recently, we found that exon-int...
The phenotype of an organism is an outcome of both its genotype, encoding the primary sequence of proteins, and the developmental orchestration of gene expression. The substrate of gene expression in eukaryote...
Phasmids show noteworthy abilities to overcome species-specific reproductive isolation mechanisms, including hybridization, polyploidy, parthenogenesis, hybridogenesis and androgenesis. From an evolutionary st...
The tree of life is significantly asymmetrical - a result of differential speciation and extinction - but general causes of such asymmetry are unclear. Differences in niche partitioning are thought to be one p...
Local adaptation to divergent environmental conditions can promote population genetic differentiation even in the absence of geographic barriers and hence, lead to speciation. Perturbations by catastrophic eve...
The composition of the arthropod head is one of the most contentious issues in animal evolution. In particular, controversy surrounds the homology and innervation of segmental cephalic appendages by the brain....
A phylogenetic network is a generalization of phylogenetic trees that allows the representation of conflicting signals or alternative evolutionary histories in a single diagram. There are several methods for c...
The influenza A virus is an important infectious cause of morbidity and mortality in humans and was responsible for 3 pandemics in the 20th century. As the replication of the influenza virus is based on its host'...
Many butterfly species have been experiencing the northward range expansion and physiological adaptation, probably due to climate warming. Here, we document an extraordinary field case of a species of lycaenid...
Aphids are striking in their prodigious reproductive capacity and reliance on microbial endosymbionts, which provision their hosts with necessary amino acids and provide protection against parasites and heat s...
Non-parametric bootstrapping is a widely-used statistical procedure for assessing confidence of model parameters based on the empirical distribution of the observed data [1] and, as such, it has become a common m...
Classification of bacteria within the genus Brucella has been difficult due in part to considerable genomic homogeneity between the different species and biovars, in spite of clear differences in phenotypes. Ther...
Owl monkeys, belonging to the genus Aotus, have been extensively used as animal models in biomedical research but few reports have focused on the taxonomy and phylogeography of this genus. Moreover, the morpholog...
Cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterases (PDEs) hydrolyze the intracellular second messengers: cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) and cyclic guanine monophosphate (cGMP). The cAMP-specific PDE family 4 (PDE4) i...
The use of molecular genetic data in phylogenetic systematics has revolutionized this field of research in that several taxonomic groupings defined by traditional taxonomic approaches have been rejected by mol...
Sexual morphological features are known to be associated with the mating systems of several animal groups. However, it has been suggested that morphological features other than sexual characteristics could als...
Recent approaches for context-dependent evolutionary modelling assume that the evolution of a given site depends upon its ancestor and that ancestor's immediate flanking sites. Because such dependency pattern ...
Spidroins are a unique family of large, structural proteins that make up the bulk of spider silk fibers. Due to the highly variable nature of their repetitive sequences, spidroin evolutionary relationships hav...
Explicit evolutionary models are required in maximum-likelihood and Bayesian inference, the two methods that are overwhelmingly used in phylogenetic studies of DNA sequence data. Appropriate selection of nucle...
One of the main objectives of the molecular evolution and evolutionary systems biology field is to reveal the underlying principles that dictate protein evolutionary rates. Several studies argue that expressio...
Different theories for the origin of the angiosperm hermaphrodite flower make different predictions concerning the overlap between the genes expressed in the male and female cones of gymnosperms and the genes ...
The processes governing the origin and maintenance of mimetic phenotypes can only be understood in a phylogenetic framework. Phylogenetic estimates of evolutionary relationships can provide a context for analy...
The age of unisexual salamanders of the genus Ambystoma is contentious. Recent and ancient evolutionary histories of unisexual Ambystoma were proposed by a few separate studies that constructed phylogenies using ...
The Strait of Gibraltar is a crucial area in the settlement history of modern humans because it represents a possible connection between Africa and Europe. So far, genetic data were inconclusive about the fact...
Explanations for the evolution of female-biased, extreme Sexual Size Dimorphism (SSD), which has puzzled researchers since Darwin, are still controversial. Here we propose an extension of the Gravity Hypothesi...
Mites (Acari) have traditionally been treated as monophyletic, albeit composed of two major lineages: Acariformes and Parasitiformes. Yet recent studies based on morphology, molecular data, or combinations the...
The self-fertile filamentous ascomycete Neurospora tetrasperma contains a large (~7 Mbp) and young (< 6 MYA) region of suppressed recombination within its mating-type (mat) chromosomes. The objective of the prese...
The extended light-harvesting complex (LHC) protein superfamily is a centerpiece of eukaryotic photosynthesis, comprising the LHC family and several families involved in photoprotection, like the LHC-like and ...
One key question in evolutionary biology deals with the mode and rate at which reproductive isolation accumulates during allopatric speciation. Little is known about secondary contacts of recently diverged anu...
The ferlin gene family possesses a rare and identifying feature consisting of multiple tandem C2 domains and a C-terminal transmembrane domain. Much currently remains unknown about the fundamental function of ...
Pelobacter carbinolicus, a bacterium of the family Geobacteraceae, cannot reduce Fe(III) directly or produce electricity like its relatives. How P. carbinolicus evolved is an intriguing problem. The genome of P. ...
The maternally inherited, bacterial symbiont, parthenogenesis inducing (PI) Wolbachia, causes females in some haplodiploid insects to produce daughters from both fertilized and unfertilized eggs. The symbionts, w...
Phylogenetic relationships among myxosporeans based on ribosomal DNA data disagree with traditional taxonomic classification: a number of myxosporeans with very similar spore morphology are assigned to the sam...
Polymorphisms of single amino acid repeats (SARPs) are a potential source of genetic variation for rapidly evolving morphological traits. Here, we characterize variation in and test for an association between ...
Water Rails (Rallus aquaticus) inhabit fragmented freshwater wetlands across their Palearctic distribution. Disjunct populations are now thought to be morphologically similar over their vast geographic range, tho...
Mammalian sex-chromosomes originated from a pair of autosomes. A step-wise cessation of recombination is necessary for the proper maintenance of sex-determination and, consequently, generates a four strata str...
Phenotypic and molecular genetic data often provide conflicting patterns of intraspecific relationships confounding phylogenetic inference, particularly among birds where a variety of environmental factors may...
Interleukin-4 (IL4) is a secreted immunoregulatory cytokine critically involved in host protection from parasitic helminths [1]. Reasoning that helminths may have evolved mechanisms to antagonize IL4 to maximize ...
The chamois, distributed over most of the medium to high altitude mountain ranges of southern Eurasia, provides an excellent model for exploring the effects of historical and evolutionary events on diversifica...
Allometry, the association between size and shape, has long been considered an evolutionary constraint because of its ability to channel variation in particular directions in response to evolution of size. Sev...
Comparative phylogeography recently performed on the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (mtCOI) gene from seven deep-sea vent species suggested that the East Pacific Rise fauna has undergone a vicariant event wit...
Of the c. 450 families of flowering plants, only two are left "unplaced" in the most recent APG classification of angiosperms. One of these is the Apodanthaceae, a clade of c. 19 holoparasitic species in two o...
As predicted by theory, traits associated with reproduction often evolve at a comparatively high speed. This is especially the case for courtship behaviour which plays a central role in reproductive isolation....
A major goal in evolutionary biology is to understand the evolution of phenotypic diversity. Both natural and sexual selection play a large role in generating phenotypic adaptations, with biomechanical require...
Elevated blood O2 affinity enhances survival at low O2 pressures, and is perhaps the best known and most broadly accepted evolutionary adjustment of terrestrial vertebrates to environmental hypoxia. This phenotyp...
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