Page 72 of 96
Altruistic anti-predatory behaviours pose an evolutionary problem because they are costly to the actor and beneficial to the recipients. Altruistic behaviours can evolve through indirect fitness benefits when ...
Many population genetic and phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) assume that mitochondrial genomes do not undergo recombination. Recently, concerted evolution of duplicated mitochondrial control ...
Rare species have seldom been studied in marine habitats, mainly because it is difficult to formally assess the status of rare species, especially in patchy benthic organisms, for which samplings are often ass...
The original article was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2009 9:260
Environmental conditions affect the topology of the adaptive landscape and thus the trajectories followed by evolving populations. For example, a heterogeneous environment might lead to a more rugged adaptive ...
Transposable Elements (TEs) make up the majority of plant genomes, and thus understanding TE evolutionary dynamics is key to understanding plant genome evolution. Plant reproductive systems are diverse and mat...
Immune responses to parasites, which start with pathogen recognition, play a decisive role in the control of the infection in mosquitoes. Peptidoglycan recognition proteins (PGRPs) are an important family of p...
The right sampling of homologous sequences for phylogenetic or molecular evolution analyses is a crucial step, the quality of which can have a significant impact on the final interpretation of the study. There...
Carassius auratus is a primary freshwater fish with bisexual diploid and unisexual gynogenetic triploid lineages. It is distributed widely in Eurasia and is especially common in East Asia. Although several geneti...
Concerted evolution has been believed to account for homogenization of genes within multigene families. However, the exact mechanisms involved in the homogenization have been under debate. Use of interspecific...
Estimates of divergence dates between species improve our understanding of processes ranging from nucleotide substitution to speciation. Such estimates are frequently based on molecular genetic differences bet...
Pedomorphism is the retention of ancestrally juvenile traits by adults in a descendant taxon. Despite its importance for evolutionary change, there are few examples of a molecular basis for this phenomenon. No...
The great variety in sequence, length, complexity, and abundance of satellite DNA has made it difficult to ascribe any function to this genome component. Recent studies have shown that satellite DNA can be tra...
In order to investigate the rate and limits of the response to selection from highly inbred genetic material and evaluate the respective contribution of standing variation and new mutations, we conducted a div...
Diatoms are one of the most species-rich groups of eukaryotic microbes known. Diatoms are also the only group of eukaryotic micro-algae with a diplontic life history, suggesting that the ancestral diatom switc...
Inteins and introns are genetic elements that are removed from proteins and RNA after translation or transcription, respectively. Previous studies have suggested that these genetic elements are found in conser...
Twelve populations of E. coli were serially propagated for 20,000 generations in a glucose-supplemented minimal medium in order to study the dynamics of evolution. We sought to find and characterize one of the be...
Non-coding satellite DNA (satDNA) usually has a high turn-over rate frequently leading to species specific patterns. However, some satDNA families evolve more slowly and can be found in several related species...
Current molecular phylogenetic studies of Lepidoptera and most other arthropods are predominantly based on mitochondrial genes and a limited number of nuclear genes. The nuclear genes, however, generally do no...
Dentin sialophosphoprotein (DSPP) is the largest member of the SIBLING family and is the most abundant noncollagenous protein in dentin. DSPP is also expressed in non-mineralized tissues including metabolicall...
Phylogenetic analyses provide a framework for examining the evolution of morphological and molecular diversity, interpreting patterns in biogeography, and achieving a stable classification. The generic and sup...
Marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) inhabit the coastlines of large and small islands throughout the Galápagos archipelago, providing a rich system to study the spatial and temporal factors influencing the p...
Variation of resource supply is one of the key factors that drive the evolution of life-history strategies, and hence the interactions between individuals. In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, two life-history ...
Oxidative phosphorylation is central to the energy metabolism of the cell. Due to adaptation to different life-styles and environments, fungal species have shaped their respiratory pathways in the course of ev...
The common vampire bat Desmodus rotundus is an excellent model organism for studying ecological vicariance in the Neotropics due to its broad geographic range and its preference for forested areas as roosting sit...
In recent years, the relaxin family of signaling molecules has been shown to play diverse roles in mammalian physiology, but little is known about its diversity or physiology in teleosts, an infraclass of the ...
Bacterial endosymbiosis has a recurring significance in the evolution of insects. An estimated 10-20% of insect species depend on bacterial associates for their nutrition and reproductive viability. Members of...
Genes with sex-biased expression often show rapid molecular evolution between species. Previous population genetic and comparative genomic studies of Drosophila melanogaster and D. simulans revealed that male-bia...
Ophiocordyceps sinensis (syn. Cordyceps sinensis), endemic to alpine regions on the Tibetan plateau, is one of the most valuable medicinal fungi in the world. Huge commercial demand has led to excessive harvest a...
Inbreeding can slow population growth and elevate extinction risk. A small number of unrelated immigrants to an inbred population can substantially reduce inbreeding and improve fitness, but little attention h...
The evolutionary success of phytophagous insects could result from their adaptation to different host-plants. Alternatively, the diversification of widespread species might be driven by adaptation along enviro...
Hydrogenosomes are organelles that produce molecular hydrogen and ATP. The broad phylogenetic distribution of their hosts suggests that the hydrogenosomes of these organisms evolved several times independently...
Although cis-regulatory changes play an important role in evolution, it remains difficult to establish the contribution of natural selection to regulatory differences between species. For protein coding regions, ...
Codon usage may vary significantly between different organisms and between genes within the same organism. Several evolutionary processes have been postulated to be the predominant determinants of codon usage:...
Few studies address the issue of hybridization in a more than two-species context. The species-rich Quercus complex is one of the systems which can offer such an opportunity. To investigate the contemporary patte...
Transgressive segregation describes the occurrence of novel phenotypes in hybrids with extreme trait values not observed in either parental species. A previously experimentally untested prediction is that the ...
The study of venomous fishes is in a state of relative infancy when compared to that of other groups of venomous organisms. Catfishes (Order Siluriformes) are a diverse group of bony fishes that have long been...
Like other vertebrates, primates recognize their relatives, primarily to minimize inbreeding, but also to facilitate nepotism. Although associative, social learning is typically credited for discrimination of ...
In the mega-diverse insect order Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths; 165,000 described species), deeper relationships are little understood within the clade Ditrysia, to which 98% of the species belong. To beg...
The Zaprionus genus shares evolutionary features with the melanogaster subgroup, such as space and time of origin. Although little information about the transposable element content in the Zaprionus genus had bee...
Sexual size dimorphism (SSD) is a key evolutionary feature that has been studied in many organisms. In a wide range of species, this pattern is more complex because of polymorphism within each sex. However, it...
Whole genome sequences have allowed us to have an overview of the evolution of gene repertoires. The target of the present study, the TGFβ superfamily, contains many genes involved in vertebrate development, a...
Marine fishes have been shown to display low levels of genetic structuring and associated high levels of gene flow, suggesting shallow evolutionary trajectories and, possibly, limited or lacking adaptive diver...
Gene and genome duplication is the principle creative force in evolution. Recently, protein subcellular relocalization, or neolocalization was proposed as one of the mechanisms responsible for the retention of...
The entry of HIV into its target cells is facilitated by the prior binding to the cell surface molecule CD4 and a secondary coreceptor, mostly the chemokine receptors CCR5 or CXCR4. In early infection CCR5-usi...
One of the major recent advances in evolutionary biology is the recognition that evolutionary interactions between species are substantially differentiated among geographic populations. To date, several author...
Resolving the evolutionary relationships among Fungi remains challenging because of their highly variable evolutionary rates, and lack of a close phylogenetic outgroup. Nucleariida, an enigmatic group of amoeb...
The gene FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) and its orthologues play a central role in the integration of flowering signals within Arabidopsis and other diverse species. Multiple copies of FT, with different cis-intronic seq...
The internal phylogenetic relationships of Annelida, one of the key lophotrochozoan lineages, are still heavily debated. Recent molecular analyses suggest that morphologically distinct groups, such as the poly...
Genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) code for key functions in the adaptive immune response of vertebrates and most of them show exceptionally high polymorphism. This polymorphism has been assoc...
View featured videos from across the BMC-series journals
For BMC Evolutionary Biology (former title)
2022 Citation Impact
3.4 - 2-year Impact Factor
3.6 - 5-year Impact Factor
1.061 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
0.968 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)
2023 Speed
29 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
193 days submission to accept (Median)
2023 Usage
1,882,764 downloads
3,013 Altmetric mentions
Transparency and Openness
TOP Factor score - 9
Peer Community In
BMC Ecology and Evolution welcomes submissions of pre-print manuscripts recommended by the Peer Community In (PCI) platform. The journal may use PCI reviews and recommendations for the review process if appropriate. For instructions to submit your PCI recommended article, please click here. To find out more, please read our blog.