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While numerous studies revealed the major role of environmental changes of the Quaternary on the evolution of biodiversity, research on the influence of that period on current South-American fauna is scarce an...
Class C G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) represent a distinct group of the GPCR family, which structurally possess a characteristically distinct extracellular domain inclusive of the Venus flytrap module (V...
Protein domains represent the basic units in the evolution of proteins. Domain duplication and shuffling by recombination and fusion, followed by divergence are the most common mechanisms in this process. Such...
Ecological factors play an important role in the evolution of parasite exploitation strategies. A common prediction is that, as shorter host life span reduces future opportunities of transmission, parasites co...
The interaction between the Blue Moon butterfly, Hypolimnas bolina, and Wolbachia has attracted interest because of the high prevalence of male-killing achieved within the species, the ecological consequences of ...
Chad Basin, lying within the bidirectional corridor of African Sahel, is one of the most populated places in Sub-Saharan Africa today. The origin of its settlement appears connected with Holocene climatic amel...
In plants, expression of ARGONAUTE1 (AGO1), the catalytic subunit of the RNA-Induced Silencing Complex responsible for post-transcriptional gene silencing, is controlled through a feedback loop involving the m...
Phylogenetic analyses of angiosperm relationships have used only a small percentage of available sequence data, but phylogenetic data matrices often can be augmented with existing data, especially if one allow...
Yeast and animal cells require six mini-chromosome maintenance proteins (Mcm2-7) for pre-replication complex formation, DNA replication initiation and DNA synthesis. These six individual MCM proteins form dist...
The evolution of barriers to reproduction is of key interest to understand speciation. However, there may be a current bias towards studying intrinsic postzygotic isolation in old species pairs as compared to ...
Horizontal transfers (HTs) refer to the transmission of genetic material between phylogenetically distant species. Although most of the cases of HTs described so far concern genes, there is increasing evidence...
In all jawed vertebrates, highly polymorphic genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) encode antigen presenting molecules that play a key role in the adaptive immune response. Their polymorphism is ...
Phylogenies often contain both well-supported and poorly supported nodes. Determining how much additional data might be required to eventually recover most or all nodes with high support is an important pragma...
Divergently-paired genes (DPGs) are defined as two adjacent genes that are transcribed toward the opposite direction (or from different DNA strands) and shared their transcription start sites (TSSs) less than ...
During the last ten years, major advances have been made in characterizing and understanding the evolution of mitochondrial DNA, the most popular marker of molecular biodiversity. Several important results wer...
Research on the evolution of reproductive isolation in African cichlid fishes has largely focussed on the role of male colours and female mate choice. Here, we tested predictions from the hypothesis that allop...
SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) was identified as the etiological agent of SARS, and extensive investigations indicated that it originated from an animal source (probably bats) and was recently introduced into the...
A recent study by Tadepally et al. describes the clustering of zinc finger (ZF) genes in the human genome and traces their evolutionary history among several placental mammals with complete or draft genome seq...
Neuropeptide ligands have to fit exactly into their respective receptors and thus the evolution of the coding regions of their genes is constrained and may be strongly conserved. As such, they may be suitable ...
Patterns of mtDNA variation within a species reflect long-term population structure, but may also be influenced by maternally inherited endosymbionts, such as Wolbachia. These bacteria often alter host reproducti...
Although the gene encoding for glutamine synthetase (glnA) is essential in several organisms, multiple glnA copies have been identified in bacterial genomes such as those of the phylum Actinobacteria, notably the...
Vasopressin and oxytocin are mammalian neurohypophysial hormones with distinct functions. Vasopressin is involved mainly in osmoregulation and oxytocin is involved primarily in parturition and lactation. Jawed...
The cattle tick, Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus, economically impact cattle industry in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The morphological and genetic differences among R. microplus strains hav...
Corals are notoriously difficult to identify at the species-level due to few diagnostic characters and variable skeletal morphology. This 'coral species problem' is an impediment to understanding the evolution...
Microbes must sense environmental stresses, transduce these signals and mount protective responses to survive in hostile environments. In this study we have tested the hypothesis that fungal stress signalling ...
The interactions of fig wasps and their host figs provide a model for investigating co-evolution. Fig wasps have specialized morphological characters and lifestyles thought to be adaptations to living in the f...
The evolution of insecticide resistance and persistence of resistance phenotypes are influenced by the fitness of resistance alleles in the absence of insecticide pressure. Experimental determination of fitnes...
Perception of sugars is an invaluable ability for insects which often derive quickly accessible energy from these molecules. A distinctive subfamily of eight proteins within the gustatory receptor (Gr) family ...
The territorial fishing zones of Australia and Indonesia are contiguous to the north of Australia in the Timor and Arafura Seas and in the Indian Ocean to the north of Christmas Island. The area surrounding th...
Two key genes of the translational apparatus, elongation factor-1 alpha (EF-1α) and elongation factor-like (EFL) have an almost mutually exclusive distribution in eukaryotes. In the green plant lineage, the Ch...
Island populations are excellent model systems for studies of phenotypic, ecological and molecular evolution. In this study, molecular markers of mitochondrial and nuclear derivation were used to investigate t...
Biology has increasingly recognized the necessity to build and utilize larger phylogenies to address broad evolutionary questions. Large phylogenies have facilitated the discovery of differential rates of mole...
A large number of theories have been advanced to explain why genes involved in the same biochemical processes are often co-located in genomes. Most of these theories have been dismissed because empirical data ...
The rattlesnake rattling system is an evolutionary novelty that includes anatomical, behavioral, and physiological modifications of the generalized pitviper tail. One such modification, the formation of a bony...
Akirins are nuclear proteins that form part of an innate immune response pathway conserved in Drosophila and mice. This studies aim was to characterise the evolution of akirin gene structure and protein function ...
Sex differences in lifespan are ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom but the causes underlying this phenomenon remain poorly understood. Several explanations based on asymmetrical inheritance patterns (sex...
Hybrid zones generally represent areas of secondary contact after speciation. The nature of the interaction between genes of individuals in a hybrid zone is of interest in the study of evolutionary processes. ...
The histone H2A family encompasses the greatest number of core histone variants of which the replacement variant H2A.Z is currently one of the most heavily studied. No clear mechanism for the functional variab...
Species are viewed as the fundamental unit in most subdisciplines of biology. To conservationists this unit represents the currency for global biodiversity assessments. Even though Madagascar belongs to one of...
The thin-spined porcupine, also known as the bristle-spined rat, Chaetomys subspinosus (Olfers, 1818), the only member of its genus, figures among Brazilian endangered species. In addition to being threatened, it...
The question of how genomic processes, such as gene duplication, give rise to co-ordinated organismal properties, such as emergence of new body plans, organs and lifestyles, is of importance in developmental a...
In ecological character displacement, traits involved in reproductive isolation may not evolve in arbitrary directions when changes in these traits are by-products of adaptation to an ecological niche. In repr...
Costs of adaptation play an important role in host-parasite coevolution. For parasites, evolving the ability to circumvent host resistance may trade off with subsequent growth or transmission. Such costs of vi...
Species that are widespread throughout historically glaciated and currently non-glaciated areas provide excellent opportunities to investigate the role of Pleistocene climatic change on the distribution of Nor...
Damselfishes (Perciformes, Pomacentridae) are a major component of coral reef communities, and the functional diversity of their trophic anatomy is an important constituent of the ecological morphology of thes...
Amino acid insertions and deletions in proteins are considered relatively rare events, and their associations with the evolution and adaptation of organisms are not yet understood. In this study, we undertook ...
The phylogeny of Eumalacostraca (Crustacea) remains elusive, despite over a century of interest. Recent morphological and molecular phylogenies appear highly incongruent, but this has not been assessed quantit...
The phylogeny of Cetacea (whales) is not fully resolved with substantial support. The ambiguous and conflicting results of multiple phylogenetic studies may be the result of the use of too little data, phyloge...
In eukaryotic cells, directional transport between different compartments of the endomembrane system is mediated by vesicles that bud from a donor organelle and then fuse with an acceptor organelle. A family o...
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