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The autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is mostly caused by mutations in the PKD1 (polycystic kidney disease 1) gene located in 16p13.3. Moreover, there are six pseudogenes of PKD1 that are locat...
Evolution involves both deterministic and random processes, both of which are known to contribute to directional evolutionary change. A number of studies have shown that when fitness is treated as a random var...
Members of the forkhead gene family act as transcription regulators in biological processes including development and metabolism. The evolution of forkhead genes has not been widely examined and selection pres...
All bilaterian animals share a general genetic framework that controls the formation of their body structures, although their forms are highly diversified. The Hox genes that encode transcription factors play ...
Teleost radiation in the oceans required specific physiological adaptations in eggs and early embryos to survive in the hyper-osmotic seawater. Investigating the evolution of aquaporins (AQPs) in these vertebr...
The animal sialyltransferases, which catalyze the transfer of sialic acid to the glycan moiety of glycoconjugates, are subdivided into four families: ST3Gal, ST6Gal, ST6GalNAc and ST8Sia, based on acceptor sug...
The rate of nucleotide substitutions is not constant across the Tree of Life, and departures from a molecular clock have been commonly reported. Within parmelioid lichens, the largest group of macrolichens, la...
Cyanobacteria produce a wealth of secondary metabolites, including the group of small cyclic heptapeptide hepatotoxins that constitutes the microcystin family. The enzyme complex that directs the biosynthesis ...
Accurately modeling the sequence substitution process is required for the correct estimation of evolutionary parameters, be they phylogenetic relationships, substitution rates or ancestral states; it is also c...
Ever since the theory about two rounds of genome duplication (2R) in the vertebrate lineage was proposed, the Hox gene clusters have served as the prime example of quadruplicate paralogy in mammalian genomes. ...
Female endoparasitic ichneumonid wasps inject virus-like particles into their caterpillar hosts to suppress immunity. These particles are classified as ichnovirus virions and resemble ascovirus virions, which ...
Large pelagic fishes are generally thought to have little population genetic structuring based on their cosmopolitan distribution, large population sizes and high dispersal capacities. However, gene flow can b...
A recent study by Barthélémy et al. described a set of ribosomal protein (RP) genes extracted from a collection of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) of the chaetognath (arrow worm) Spadella cephaloptera. Three main ...
The serpin (serine protease inhibitor) superfamily constitutes a class of functionally highly diverse proteins usually encompassing several dozens of paralogs in mammals. Though phylogenetic classification of ...
The MC1R (melanocortin-1 receptor) locus underlies intraspecific variation in melanin-based dark plumage coloration in several unrelated birds with plumage polymorphisms. There is far less evidence for functional...
Management strategies for coral reefs are dependant on information about the spatial population structure and connectivity of reef organisms. Genetic tools can reveal important information about population str...
We describe a function-driven approach to the analysis of metabolism which takes into account the phylogenetic origin of biochemical reactions to reveal subtle lineage-specific metabolic innovations, undetecta...
The ability to form teeth was lost in an ancestor of all modern birds, approximately 100-80 million years ago. However, experiments in chicken have revealed that the oral epithelium can respond to inductive si...
Grasses are adapted to a wide range of climatic conditions. Species of the subfamily Pooideae, which includes wheat, barley and important forage grasses, have evolved extreme frost tolerance. A class of ice bi...
Hemerythrins, are the non-heme, diiron binding respiratory proteins of brachiopods, priapulids and sipunculans; they are also found in annelids and bacteria, where their functions have not been fully elucidated.
Male killing endosymbionts manipulate their arthropod host reproduction by only allowing female embryos to develop into infected females and killing all male offspring. Because of the reproductive manipulation...
The trade-off between current and future parental investment is often different between males and females. This difference may lead to sexual conflict between parents over care provisioning in animals that bre...
Hair is unique to mammals. Keratin associated proteins (KRTAPs), which contain two major groups: high/ultrahigh cysteine and high glycine-tyrosine, are one of the major components of hair and play essential ro...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2009 9:213
The bananaquit (Coereba flaveola) is a small nectivorous and frugivorous emberizine bird (order Passeriformes) that is an abundant resident throughout the Caribbean region. We used multi-gene analyses to investig...
Social insects dominate ecological communities because of their sophisticated group behaviors. However, the intricate behaviors of social insects may be exploited by social parasites, which manipulate insect s...
Recent work on the complexity of life highlights the roles played by evolutionary forces at different levels of individuality. One of the central puzzles in explaining transitions in individuality for entities...
Ants of the genus Lasius are ecologically important and an important system for evolutionary research. Progress in evolutionary research has been hindered by the lack of a well-founded phylogeny of the subgenera,...
Exaggerated male ornaments and displays often evolve in species where males only provide females with ejaculates during reproduction. Although "good genes" arguments are typically invoked to explain this pheno...
Genetic estimates of effective population size often generate surprising results, including dramatically low ratios of effective population size to census size. This is particularly true for many marine specie...
Transposable elements (TEs) constitute a substantial amount of all eukaryotic genomes. They induce an important proportion of deleterious mutations by insertion into genes or gene regulatory regions. However, ...
The genus Listeria includes two closely related pathogenic and non-pathogenic species, L. monocytogenes and L. innocua. L. monocytogenes is an opportunistic human foodborne and animal pathogen that includes two c...
ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (AGPase), which catalyses a rate limiting step in starch synthesis, is a heterotetramer comprised of two identical large and two identical small subunits in plants. Although the l...
The ability for an evolving population to adapt to a novel environment is achieved through a balance of robustness and evolvability. Robustness is the invariance of phenotype in the face of perturbation and ev...
The "out of Africa" model postulating single "southern route" dispersal posits arrival of "Anatomically Modern Human" to Indian subcontinent around 66–70 thousand years before present (kyBP). However the contr...
Multi-Locus Sequence Typing (MLST) has emerged as a leading molecular typing method owing to its high ability to discriminate among bacterial isolates, the relative ease with which data acquisition and analysi...
Members of the Runx family of transcriptional regulators, which bind DNA as heterodimers with CBFβ, are known to play critical roles in embryonic development in many triploblastic animals such as mammals and i...
Human genetic diversity observed in Indian subcontinent is second only to that of Africa. This implies an early settlement and demographic growth soon after the first 'Out-of-Africa' dispersal of anatomically ...
Five regulatory factor X (RFX) transcription factors (TFs)–RFX1-5–have been previously characterized in the human genome, which have been demonstrated to be critical for development and are associated with an ...
The TRIM family is composed of multi-domain proteins that display the Tripartite Motif (RING, B-box and Coiled-coil) that can be associated with a C-terminal domain. TRIM genes are involved in ubiquitylation a...
Eukaryotic mRNAs often contain secondary structures in their untranslated regions that are involved in expression regulation. Whether secondary structures in the protein coding regions are of functional import...
Malaria kills more people worldwide than all inherited human genetic disorders combined. To characterize how the parasites causing this disease adapt to different host environments, we compared the evolutionar...
G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the most numerous proteins in mammalian genomes, and the most common targets of clinical drugs. However, their evolution remains enigmatic. GPCRs are intimately associat...
A Baltic population of Atlantic sturgeon was founded ~1,200 years ago by migrants from North America, but after centuries of persistence, the population was extirpated in the 1960s, mainly as a result of over-...
Despite being one of the most studied families within the Carnivora, the phylogenetic relationships among the members of the bear family (Ursidae) have long remained unclear. Widely divergent topologies have b...
The origin of nuclear receptors (NRs) and the question whether the ancestral NR was a liganded or an unliganded transcription factor has been recently debated. To obtain insight into the evolution of the ligan...
Within Chlorophyceae the ITS2 secondary structure shows an unbranched helix I, except for the 'Hydrodictyon' and the 'Scenedesmus' clade having a ramified first helix. The latter two are classified within the Sph...
Severe ecological and economic impacts caused by some invasive species make it imperative to understand the attributes that permit them to spread. A notorious crop pest across its native range in South America...
The original article was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2007 7:216
Recent advances in DNA sequencing and computation offer the opportunity for reliable estimates of divergence times between organisms based on molecular data. Bayesian estimations of divergence times that do no...
Beta-N-acetylhexosaminidases belonging to the glycosyl hydrolase 20 (GH20) family are involved in the removal of terminal β-glycosidacally linked N-acetylhexosamine residues. These enzymes, widely distributed ...
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