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The Neotropical ovenbird-woodcreeper family (Furnariidae) is an avian group characterized by exceptionally diverse ecomorphological adaptations. For instance, members of the family are known to construct nests...
Cullins are proteins involved in ubiquitination through their participation in multisubunit ubiquitin ligase complexes. In this study, I use comparative genomic data to establish the pattern of emergence and d...
The cystatin superfamily comprises cysteine protease inhibitors that play key regulatory roles in protein degradation processes. Although they have been the subject of many studies, little is known about their...
The mitochondrial genomes of plants generally encode 30-40 identified protein-coding genes and a large number of lineage-specific ORFs. The lack of wide conservation for most ORFs suggests they are unlikely to...
The bacterium Salmonella enterica includes a diversity of serotypes that cause disease in humans and different animal species. Some Salmonella serotypes show a broad host range, some are host restricted and exclu...
Molecular tools may help to uncover closely related and still diverging species from a wide variety of taxa and provide insight into the mechanisms, pace and geography of marine speciation. There is a certain ...
Culex pipiens L. is the most widespread mosquito vector in temperate regions. This species consists of two forms, denoted molestus and pipiens, that exhibit important behavioural and physiological differences. Th...
Mutualisms are inherently conflictual as one partner always benefits from reducing the costs imposed by the other. Despite the widespread recognition that mutualisms are essentially reciprocal exploitation, th...
Recent phylogenetic studies have revealed that the mitochondrial genome of the angiosperm Silene noctiflora (Caryophyllaceae) has experienced a massive mutation-driven acceleration in substitution rate, placing i...
The primates are among the most broadly studied mammalian orders, with the published literature containing extensive analyses of their behavior, physiology, genetics and ecology. The importance of this group i...
Vibrio taxonomy has been based on a polyphasic approach. In this study, we retrieve useful taxonomic information (i.e. data that can be used to distinguish different taxonomic levels, such as species and genera) ...
Cooperative hunting and foraging in spiders is rare and prone to cheating such that the actions of selfish individuals negatively affect the whole group. The resulting social dilemma may be mitigated by kin se...
The Nme family, previously known as Nm23 or NDPK, is involved in various molecular processes including tumor metastasis and some members of the family, but not all, exhibit a Nucleoside Diphosphate Kinase (NDP...
Major modifications to the pharyngeal jaw apparatus are widely regarded as a recurring evolutionary key innovation that has enabled adaptive radiation in many species-rich clades of percomorph fishes. However ...
Hsp-90 from the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is unique in that it fails to bind to the specific Hsp-90 inhibitor, geldanamycin (GA). Here we surveyed 24 different free-living or parasitic nematodes...
Heterokont algae, together with cryptophytes, haptophytes and some alveolates, possess red-algal derived plastids. The chromalveolate hypothesis proposes that the red-algal derived plastids of all four groups ...
New genes generated by retroposition are widespread in humans and other mammalian species. Usually, this process copies a single parental gene and inserts it into a distant genomic location. However, retroposi...
The evolution of social cooperation is favored by aggregative behavior to facilitate stable social structure and proximity among kin. High dispersal rates reduce group stability and kin cohesion, so it is gene...
Polyploidization is a prominent process in plant evolution, whereas the mechanism and tempo-spatial process remained poorly understood. Oryza officinalis complex, a polyploid complex in the genus Oryza, could exe...
Of the 20 or so signal transduction pathways that orchestrate cell-cell interactions in metazoans, seven are involved during development. One of these is the Notch signalling pathway which regulates cellular i...
Hybridization events are relatively common in vascular plants. However, the frequency of these events is unevenly distributed across the plant phylogeny. Plant families in which individual species are pollinat...
Single- and low- copy genes are less likely subject to concerted evolution, thus making themselves ideal tools for studying the origin and evolution of polyploid taxa. Leymus is a polyploid genus with a diverse a...
Medicinal leeches became infamous for their utility in bloodletting popularized in the 19th century, and have seen a recent resurgence in post-operative treatments for flap and replantation surgeries, and in term...
Many molecular phylogenetic analyses rely on DNA sequence data obtained from single or multiple loci, particularly mitochondrial DNA loci. However, phylogenies for taxa that have undergone recent, rapid radiat...
ECE-CYC2 clade genes known in patterning floral dorsoventral asymmetry (zygomorphy) in Antirrhinum majus are conserved in the dorsal identity function including arresting the dorsal stamen. However, it remains un...
Neurotrophins and their Trk and p75NTR receptors play an important role in the nervous system. To date, neurotrophins, Trk and p75NTR have only been found concomitantly in deuterostomes. In protostomes, homolo...
A common feature of chemosensory systems is the involvement of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) in the detection of environmental stimuli. Several lineages of GPCRs are involved in vertebrate olfaction, inc...
Bacterial biofilm is ubiquitous in nature. However, it is not clear how this crowded habitat would impact the evolution of bacteriophage (phage) life history traits. In this study, we constructed isogenic λ ph...
Since the drastic reorganisation of the phylogeny of the animal kingdom into three major clades of bilaterians; Ecdysozoa, Lophotrochozoa and Deuterostomia, it became glaringly obvious that the selection of mo...
Hieracium s.str. is a complex species-rich group of perennial herbs composed of few sexual diploids and numerous apomictic polyploids. The existence of reticulation and the near-continuity of morphological charac...
The vertebrate brain is composed of several interconnected, functionally distinct structures and much debate has surrounded the basic question of how these structures evolve. On the one hand, according to the ...
PPE38 (Rv2352c) is a member of the large PPE gene family of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and related mycobacteria. The function of PPE proteins is unknown but evidence suggests that many are cell-surface associated...
It is commonly thought that large asexual populations evolve more rapidly than smaller ones, due to their increased rate of beneficial mutations. Less clear is how population size influences the level of fitne...
The birds-of-paradise (Paradisaeidae) form one of the most prominent avian examples of sexual selection and show a complex biogeographical distribution. The family has accordingly been used as a case-study in ...
Studies of speciation mode based on phylogenies usually test the predicted effect on diversification patterns or on geographical distribution of closely related species. Here we outline an approach to infer th...
In mammals, pheromones play an important role in social and innate reproductive behavior within species. In rodents, vomeronasal receptor type 1 (V1R), which is specifically expressed in the vomeronasal organ,...
Like humans, the living elephants are unusual among mammals in being sparsely covered with hair. Relative to extant elephants, the extinct woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, had a dense hair cover and extreme...
Metabolic networks show great evolutionary plasticity, because they can differ substantially even among closely related prokaryotes. Any one metabolic network can also effectively compensate for the blockage o...
Nuclear receptors are a superfamily of metazoan transcription factors that regulate diverse developmental and physiological processes. Sequenced genomes from an increasing number of bilaterians have provided a...
The co-translational incorporation of selenocysteine into nascent polypeptides by recoding the UGA stop codon occurs in all domains of life. In eukaryotes, this event requires at least three specific factors: ...
TRP (Transient Receptor Potential) channels respond to diverse stimuli and thus function as the primary integrators of varied sensory information. They are also activated by various compounds and secondary mes...
Statistical approaches for protein design are relevant in the field of molecular evolutionary studies. In recent years, new, so-called structurally constrained (SC) models of protein-coding sequence evolution hav...
Fibroblast Growth Factors (FGF) and their receptors are well known for having major implications in cell signalling controlling embryonic development. Recently, a gene coding for a protein closely related to F...
The covarion hypothesis of molecular evolution holds that selective pressures on a given amino acid or nucleotide site are dependent on the identity of other sites in the molecule that change throughout time, ...
The glutamate receptors (GluRs) play a vital role in the mediation of excitatory synaptic transmission in the central nervous system. To clarify the evolutionary dynamics and mechanisms of the GluR genes in th...
The genus Algansea is one of the most representative freshwater fish groups in central Mexico due to its wide geographic distribution and unusual level of endemicity. Despite the small number of species, this gen...
Forkhead box, class O (FoxO) belongs to the large family of forkhead transcription factors that are characterized by a conserved forkhead box DNA-binding domain. To date, the FoxO group has four mammalian memb...
Positive selection is a driving force that has shaped the modern human. Recent developments in high throughput technologies and corresponding statistics tools have made it possible to conduct whole genome surv...
Quaternary climatic oscillations had dramatic effects on species evolution. In northern latitudes, populations had to survive the coldest periods in refugial areas and recurrently colonized northern regions du...
The chondrichthyan or cartilaginous fish (chimeras, sharks, skates and rays) occupy an important phylogenetic position as the sister group to all other jawed vertebrates and as an early lineage to diverge from...
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