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Msx originated early in animal evolution and is implicated in human genetic disorders. To reconstruct the functional evolution of Msx and inform the study of human mutations, we analyzed the phylogeny and synt...
Orthologs of the vertebrate ATP gated P2X channels have been identified in Dictyostelium and green algae, demonstrating that the emergence of ionotropic purinergic signalling was an early event in eukaryotic evol...
Male killing endosymbionts manipulate their arthropod host reproduction by only allowing female embryos to develop into infected females and killing all male offspring. Because the resulting change in sex rati...
As exemplified by the famously successful model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, nematodes offer outstanding animal systems for investigating diverse biological phenomena due to their small genome sizes, short ge...
Correction to Kirsch S, Pasantes J, Wolf A, Bogdanova N, Münch C, Pennekamp P, Krawczak M, Dworniczak B, Schempp W: Chromosomal evolution of the PKD1 gene family in primates. BMC Evolutionary Biology 2008, 8:263 ...
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are important symbionts of most plant species, promoting plant diversity and productivity. This symbiosis is thought to have contributed to the early colonisation of land by ...
Sensing bitter tastes is crucial for many animals because it can prevent them from ingesting harmful foods. This process is mainly mediated by the bitter taste receptors (T2R), which are largely expressed in t...
This study was motivated by the observation of unusual mitochondrial haplotype distributions and associated physiological differences between populations of the killifish Fundulus heteroclitus distributed along t...
The SPFH protein superfamily is a diverse family of proteins whose eukaryotic members are involved in the scaffolding of detergent-resistant microdomains. Recently the origin of the SPFH proteins has been ques...
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is an important process, which contributes in bacterial pathogenesis and drug resistance. A number of methods have been proposed for detection of horizontal gene transfer. One su...
Sleep is an enigma. Why animals forgo eating and reproducing, while potentially increasing their risk of predation remains unknown. Although some may question whether all animals sleep, it is clear that all li...
Sleep is a biological enigma. Despite occupying much of an animal's life, and having been scrutinized by numerous experimental studies, there is still no consensus on its function. Similarly, no hypothesis has...
A major question in behavioural ecology concerns the relationship between genetic mating systems and the strength of sexual selection. In this study, we investigated the genetic mating system of the two-spotte...
Moller and Cuervo report a significant trend between minisatellite mutation rate and the frequency of extra-pair copulations in birds. This is interpreted as evidence that the high rate of evolution demanded b...
Uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) is a mitochondrial anion carrier, expressed in brown adipose tissue (BAT) of Eutherians. UCP1 is responsible for uncoupling mitochondrial proton transport from the production of ATP...
Natural selection is a potent evolutionary force that shapes phenotypic variation to match ecological conditions. However, we know little about the year-to-year consistency of selection, or how inter-annual va...
The multiplicity or loss of the vitellogenin (vtg) gene family in vertebrates has been argued to have broad implications for the mode of reproduction (placental or non-placental), cleavage pattern (meroblastic or...
Section Calochroi is one of the most species-rich lineages in the genus Cortinarius (Agaricales, Basidiomycota) and is widely distributed across boreo-nemoral areas, with some extensions into meridional zones. Pr...
The metazoan taxon Syndermata comprising Rotifera (in the classical sense of Monogononta+Bdelloidea+Seisonidea) and Acanthocephala has raised several hypotheses connected to the phylogeny of these animal group...
Differences in plant annual/perennial habit are hypothesized to cause a generation time effect on divergence rates. Previous studies that compared rates of divergence for internal transcribed spacer (ITS1 and ITS
The filamentous fungus Ashbya gossypii grows into a multicellular mycelium that is distinct from the unicellular morphology of its closely related yeast species. It has been proposed that genes important for cell...
The high polymorphism rate in the human ABO blood group gene seems to be related to susceptibility to different pathogens. It has been estimated that all genetic variation underlying the human ABO alleles appe...
Genetic breaks separating regional lineages of marine organisms with potentially high broadcasting abilities are generally attributed either to dispersal barriers such as currents or upwelling, or to behaviour...
Mesoamerica is one of the world's most complex biogeographical regions, mostly due to its complex geological history. This complexity has led to interesting biogeographical processes that have resulted in the ...
Present day distributions of Palearctic taxa in northern latitudes mainly result from populations having survived in local patches during the Late Pleistocene and/or from recolonizing populations from southern...
Animals can gain protection against predators and parasites by living in groups. The encounter-dilution effect provides protection when the probability of detection of a group does not increase in proportion t...
Thanks to recent high coverage mass-spectrometry studies and reconstructed protein complexes, we are now in an unprecedented position to study the evolution of biological systems. Gene duplications, known to b...
Based on the observation of an increased number of paralogous genes in teleost fishes compared with other vertebrates and on the conserved synteny between duplicated copies, it has been shown that a whole geno...
Viruses that have spent most of their evolutionary time associated with a single host lineage should have sequences that reflect codivergence of virus and host. Several examples for RNA viruses of host-virus t...
Adaptive protein evolution is common in several Drosophila species investigated. Some studies point to very weak selection operating on amino-acid mutations, with average selection intensities on the order of Nes
For survival, scorpions depend on a wide array of short neurotoxic polypeptides. The venoms of scorpions from the most studied group, the Buthida, are a rich source of small, 23–78 amino acid-long peptides, we...
A fundamental challenge in evolutionary biology is to resolve the mechanisms that maintain paternity a hypervariable fitness component. Because females are often sexually promiscuous, this challenge hinges on ...
Widely used substitution models for proteins, such as the Jones-Taylor-Thornton (JTT) or Whelan and Goldman (WAG) models, are based on empirical amino acid interchange matrices estimated from databases of prot...
Brain-expressed genes that were created in primate lineage represent obvious candidates to investigate molecular mechanisms that contributed to neural reorganization and emergence of new behavioural functions in
The braconid subfamily Rogadinae is a large, cosmopolitan group of endoparasitoid wasps characterised by 'mummifying' their lepidopteran host larvae, from which the adult subsequently emerges. Rogadines attack...
Most filamentous ascomycete fungi produce high affinity iron chelators called siderophores, biosynthesized nonribosomally by multimodular adenylating enzymes called nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs). Wh...
Identifying coevolving positions in protein sequences has myriad applications, ranging from understanding and predicting the structure of single molecules to generating proteome-wide predictions of interaction...
Sex-ratio meiotic drive refers to the preferential transmission of the X chromosome by XY males. The loss of Y-bearing sperm is caused by an X-linked distorter and results in female-biased progeny. The fertility ...
Oceanography and life-history characteristics are known to influence the genetic structure of marine species, however the relative role that these factors play in shaping phylogeographic patterns remains unres...
Sister species divergence and reproductive isolation commonly results from ecological adaptation. In mimetic Heliconius butterflies, shifts in colour pattern contribute to pre- and post-mating reproductive isolat...
The Drosophila Odorant-Binding Protein (Obp) genes constitute a multigene family with moderate gene number variation across species. The OS-E and OS-F genes are the two phylogenetically closest members of this fa...
Marine allopatric speciation is an enigma because pelagic larval dispersal can potentially connect disjunct populations thereby preventing reproductive and morphological divergence. Here we present a new hiera...
The number of rodent clades identified above the family level is contentious, and to date, no consensus has been reached on the basal evolutionary relationships among all rodent families. Rodent suprafamilial ...
Nucleo-Cytoplasmic Large DNA viruses (NCLDV), a diverse group that infects a wide range of eukaryotic hosts, exhibit a large heterogeneity in genome size (between 100 kb and 1.2 Mb) but have been suggested to ...
Using information from physics, biomechanics and evolutionary biology, we explore the implications of physical constraints on sperm performance, and review empirical evidence for links between sperm length and...
The mosquito Anopheles irenicus, a member of the Anopheles punctulatus group, is geographically restricted to Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. It shows remarkable morphological similarities to one of its sibli...
Commonly used phylogenetic models assume a homogeneous evolutionary process throughout the tree. It is known that these homogeneous models are often too simplistic, and that with time some properties of the ev...
Clostridial neurotoxins (CNTs) are the most deadly toxins known and causal agents of botulism and tetanus neuroparalytic diseases. Despite considerable progress in understanding CNT structure and function, the...
The Hawaiian honeycreepers (Drepanidinae) are one of the best-known examples of an adaptive radiation, but their persistence today is threatened by the introduction of exotic pathogens and their vector, the mo...
The mitochondria of contemporary organisms contain fewer genes than the ancestral bacteria are predicted to have contained. Because most of the mitochondrial proteins are encoded in the nucleus, the genes woul...
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