Page 76 of 96
Sialic acids comprise a family of nine-carbon amino sugars that are prevalent in mucus rich environments. Sialic acids from the human host are used by a number of pathogens as an energy source. Here we explore...
In vertebrates, the molecular basis of the sense of smell is encoded by members of a large gene family, namely olfactory receptor (OR) genes. Both the total number of OR genes and the proportion of intact OR g...
Dinoflagellates represent a major lineage of unicellular eukaryotes with unparalleled diversity and complexity in morphological features. The monophyly of dinoflagellates has been convincingly demonstrated, bu...
The water-bloom-forming cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa is a known producer of various kinds of toxic and bioactive chemicals. Of these, hepatotoxic cyclic heptapeptides microcystins have been studied most ...
The role of hybridization in generating diversity in animals is an active area of discovery and debate. We assess hybridization across a contact zone of northern (Myodes rutilus) and southern (M. gapperi) red-bac...
Geographic clines within species are often interpreted as evidence of adaptation to varying environmental conditions. However, clines can also result from genetic drift, and these competing hypotheses must the...
Geminiviruses (family Geminiviridae) are small single-stranded (ss) DNA viruses infecting plants. Their virion morphology is unique in the known viral world – two incomplete T = 1 icosahedra are joined together t...
Delimiting species boundaries and reconstructing the evolutionary relationships of late Tertiary and Quaternary species radiations is difficult. One recent approach emphasizes the use of genome-wide molecular ...
Sexual dimorphism of body size has been the subject of numerous studies, but few have examined sexual shape dimorphism (SShD) and its evolution. Allometry, the shape change associated with size variation, has ...
Biological invasions can be considered one of the main threats to biodiversity, and the recognition of common ecological and evolutionary features among invaders can help developing a predictive framework to c...
Many important problems in evolutionary biology require molecular phylogenies to be reconstructed. Phylogenetic trees must then be manipulated for subsequent inclusion in publications or analyses such as super...
Mitochondrial genome comparisons contribute in multiple ways when inferring animal relationships. As well as primary sequence data, rare genomic changes such as gene order, shared gene boundaries and genetic c...
Genetic disruption of an important phenotype should favor compensatory mutations that restore the phenotype. If the genetic basis of the phenotype is modular, with a network of interacting genes whose function...
Although DNA sequence analysis is becoming a powerful tool for identifying species, it is not easy to assess whether the observed genetic disparity corresponds to reproductive isolation. Here, we compared the ...
There is increasing interest to determine the relative importance of non-additive genetic benefits as opposed to additive ones for the evolution of mating preferences and maintenance of genetic variation in se...
Climatic changes during glacial periods have had a major influence on the recent evolutionary history of living organisms, even in temperate forests on islands, where the land was not covered with ice sheets. ...
Alu elements are a family of SINE retrotransposons in primates. They are classified into subfamilies according to specific diagnostic mutations from the general Alu consensus. It is now believed that there may...
An important role in the evolution of intracellular trafficking machinery in eukaryotes played small GTPases belonging to the Rab family known as pivotal regulators of vesicle docking, fusion and transport. Th...
Amos [1] suggested recently that a previously reported positive relationship between minisatellite mutation rates and extra-pair paternity among species of birds [2] was confounded by transcription errors and sel...
The increase in availability of genomic sequences for a wide range of organisms has revealed gene duplication to be a relatively common event. Encounters with duplicate gene copies have consequently become alm...
Gaining the ability to photosynthesize was a key event in eukaryotic evolution because algae and plants form the base of the food chain on our planet. The eukaryotic machines of photosynthesis are plastids (e....
Members of the pacifastin family are serine peptidase inhibitors, most of which are produced as multi domain precursor proteins. Structural and biochemical characteristics of insect pacifastin-like peptides ha...
In Figure 1 of [Harvey et al (Evolutionary Biology 2008, 8:15)] the plotted data were inverted. The correct Figure is shown below. The text and statistical analyses in [Harvey et al (Evolutionary Biology 2008,...
The original article was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2008 8:15
The scientific literature contains many examples where DNA sequence analyses have been used to provide definitive answers to phylogenetic problems that traditional (non-DNA based) approaches alone have failed ...
An important issue concerning the evolution of duplicated genes is to understand why paralogous genes are retained in a genome even though the most likely fate for a redundant duplicated gene is nonfunctionali...
TreeBASE, the only data repository for phylogenetic studies, is not being used effectively since it does not meet the taxonomic data retrieval requirements of the systematics community. We show, through an exa...
Major conflict between mitochondrial and nuclear genes in estimating species relationships is an increasingly common finding in animals. Usually this is attributed to incomplete lineage sorting, but recently t...
Olfactory Receptors (ORs) form the largest multigene family in vertebrates. Their evolution and their expansion in the vertebrate genomes was the subject of many studies. In this paper we apply a motif-based a...
The 12-oxo-phytodienoic acid reductases (OPRs) are enzymes that catalyze the reduction of double-bonds in α, β-unsaturated aldehydes or ketones and are part of the octadecanoid pathway that converts linolenic aci...
The rate at which neutral (non-functional) bases undergo substitution is highly dependent on their location within a genome. However, it is not clear how fast these location-dependent rates change, or to what ...
Several types of selective forces can act to promote parasite specialization. Parasites might specialize on some suitable hosts at the cost of decreasing effectiveness when exploiting other species of hosts, a...
Many recent studies that relax the assumption of independent evolution of sites have done so at the expense of a drastic increase in the number of substitution parameters. While additional parameters cannot be...
Transposable elements are major constituents of eukaryote genomes and have a great impact on genome structure and stability. Considering their mutational abilities, TEs can contribute to the genetic diversity ...
The DExD/H domain containing RNA helicases such as retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I) and melanoma differentiation-associated gene 5 (MDA5) are key cytosolic pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) for detect...
Genome comparisons have made possible the reconstruction of the eutherian ancestral karyotype but also have the potential to provide new insights into the evolutionary inter-relationship of the different euthe...
Baboons of the genus Papio are distributed over wide ranges of Africa and even colonized parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Traditionally, five phenotypically distinct species are recognized, but recent molecular st...
The Correction to this article has been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2019 19:198
The phylogenetic position of turtles is the most disputed aspect in the reconstruction of the land vertebrate tree of life. This controversy has arisen after many different kinds and revisions of investigation...
Positive selection is recognized as the prevalence of nonsynonymous over synonymous substitutions in a gene. Models of the functional evolution of duplicated genes consider neofunctionalization as key to the r...
Current information about the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples is hampered by the scarcity of genetic data from well identified populations from southern Africa. Here, we fill an important gap in the analys...
Chemoreception is vitally important for all animals, yet little is known about the genetics of chemoreception in aquatic organisms. The keystone species Daphnia pulex, a well known crustacean, is the first aquati...
Thousands of parthenogenetic animal species have been described and cytogenetic manifestations of this reproductive mode are well known. However, little is understood about the molecular determinants of parthe...
Green fluorescent protein (GFP) has been found in a wide range of Cnidaria, a basal group of metazoans in which it is associated with pigmentation, fluorescence, and light absorbance. A GFP has been recently d...
Trade-offs between anti-parasite defence mechanisms and other life history traits limit the evolution of host resistance to parasites and have important implications for understanding diseases such as malaria....
Evolution of selfing can be associated with an increase in fixation of deleterious mutations, which in certain conditions can lead to species extinction. In nematodes, a few species evolved self-fertilization ...
The iroquois (iro/Irx) genes encode transcriptional regulators that belong to the TALE superclass of homeodomain proteins and have key functions during development in both vertebrates and insects. The Irx genes o...
The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a key model of genetic polymorphism. Selection pressure by pathogens or other microevolutionary forces may result in a high rate of non-synonymous substitutions at...
Phospholipid hydroperoxide glutathione peroxidases (PHGPx), the most abundant isoforms of GPx families, interfere directly with hydroperoxidation of lipids. Biochemical properties of these proteins vary along ...
Rodentia is the most diverse order of placental mammals, with extant rodent species representing about half of all placental diversity. In spite of many morphological and molecular studies, the family-level re...
Theory predicts that speciation can be quite rapid. Previous examples comprise a wide range of organisms such as sockeye salmon, polyploid hybrid plants, fruit flies and cichlid fishes. However, few studies ha...
Animal societies are diverse, ranging from small family-based groups to extraordinarily large social networks in which many unrelated individuals interact. At the extreme of this continuum, some ant species fo...
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.