Page 91 of 96
Vertebrate SWS1 visual pigments mediate visual transduction in response to light at short wavelengths. Due to their importance in vision, SWS1 genes have been isolated from a surprisingly wide range of vertebr...
The structure and evolution of hybrid zones depend mainly on the relative importance of dispersal and local adaptation, and on the strength of assortative mating. Here, we study the influence of dispersal, tem...
The PE and PPE multigene families of Mycobacterium tuberculosis comprise about 10% of the coding potential of the genome. The function of the proteins encoded by these large gene families remains unknown, althoug...
Self splicing introns and inteins that rely on a homing endonuclease for propagation are parasitic genetic elements. Their life-cycle and evolutionary fate has been described through the homing cycle. Accordin...
The higher-level phylogeny of placental mammals has long been a phylogenetic Gordian knot, with disagreement about both the precise contents of, and relationships between, the extant orders. A recent MRP super...
There have been many claims of adaptive molecular evolution, but what role does positive selection play in functional divergence? The aim of this study was to test the relationship between evolutionary and fun...
The functional repertoire of the human proteome is an incremental collection of functions accomplished by protein domains evolved along the Homo sapiens lineage. Therefore, knowledge on the origin of these functi...
Recent findings indicate that evolutionary breaks in the genome are not randomly distributed, and that certain regions, so-called fragile regions, are predisposed to breakages. Previous approaches to the study of...
The CACTA (also called En/Spm) superfamily of DNA-only transposons contain the core sequence CACTA in their Terminal Inverted Repeats (TIRs) and so far have only been described in plants. Large transcriptome a...
The fungus-growing ant-microbe symbiosis consists of coevolving microbial mutualists and pathogens. The diverse fungal lineages that these ants cultivate are attacked by parasitic microfungi of the genus Escovops...
Dolphins of the genus Lagenorhynchus are anti-tropically distributed in temperate to cool waters. Phylogenetic analyses of cytochrome b sequences have suggested that the genus is polyphyletic; however, many relat...
Hox genes code for homeodomain-containing transcription factors that function in cell fate determination and embryonic development. Hox genes are arranged in clusters with up to 14 genes. This archetypical cho...
Lutzomyia intermedia and Lutzomyia whitmani (Diptera: Psychodidae) are important and very closely related vector species of cutaneous leishmaniasis in Brazil, which are distinguishable by a few morphological diff...
With the increased availability of sequenced genomes there have been several initiatives to infer evolutionary relationships by whole genome characteristics. One of these studies suggested good congruence betw...
Figs and fig-pollinating wasps are obligate mutualists that have coevolved for ca 90 million years. They have radiated together, but do not show strict cospeciation. In particular, it is now clear that many fig s...
Many bacteria can take up DNA, but the evolutionary history and function of natural competence and transformation remain obscure. The sporadic distribution of competence suggests it is frequently lost and/or g...
For organisms living or interacting in groups, the decision-making processes of an individual may be based upon aspects of both its own state and the states of other organisms around it. Much research has soug...
Mitochondrial and nuclear genes have generally been employed for different purposes in molecular systematics, the former to resolve relationships within recently evolved groups and the latter to investigate ph...
In the time since we presented the first molecular evolutionary study of the ErbB family of receptors and the EGF family of ligands, there has been a dramatic increase in genomic sequences available. We have u...
Cyanidiales are unicellular extremophilic red algae that inhabit acidic and high temperature sites around hot springs and have also adapted to life in endolithic and interlithic habitats. Comparative genomic a...
The magnoliids with four orders, 19 families, and 8,500 species represent one of the largest clades of early diverging angiosperms. Although several recent angiosperm phylogenetic analyses supported the monoph...
In teleost fishes that lack a vomeronasal organ, both main odorant receptors (ORs) and vomeronasal receptors family 2 (V2Rs) are expressed in the olfactory epithelium, and used for perception of water-soluble ...
The spread of agriculture greatly modified the selective pressures exerted by plants on phytophagous insects, by providing these insects with a high-level resource, structured in time and space. The life histo...
At present, there is not a widely accepted consensus view regarding the phylogenetic structure of kingdom Fungi although two major phyla, Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, are clearly delineated. Regarding the low...
The domestication of plants and animals was extremely important anthropologically. Previous studies have revealed a general tendency for populations of livestock species to include deeply divergent maternal li...
The impact of global climate change on plant distribution, speciation and extinction is of current concern. Examining species climatic preferences via bioclimatic niche modelling is a key tool to study this im...
The mitochondrial genome of Metazoa is usually a compact molecule without introns. Exceptions to this rule have been reported only in corals and sea anemones (Cnidaria), in which group I introns have been disc...
A genome-wide comparative analysis of human and mouse gene expression patterns was performed in order to evaluate the evolutionary divergence of mammalian gene expression. Tissue-specific expression profiles w...
The origin of spliceosomal introns is the central subject of the introns-early versus introns-late debate. The distribution of intron phases is non-uniform, with an excess of phase-0 introns. Introns-early exp...
Symbioses between invertebrates and prokaryotes are biological systems of particular interest in order to study the evolution of mutualism. The symbioses between the entomopathogenic nematodes Steinernema and the...
Populations of Drosophila melanogaster show differences in many morphometrical traits according to their geographic origin. Despite the widespread occurrence of these differences in more than one Drosophila speci...
The shape of phylogenetic trees has been used to make inferences about the evolutionary process by comparing the shapes of actual phylogenies with those expected under simple models of the speciation process. ...
Populations of the Oriental White-backed Vulture (Gyps bengalensis) have declined by over 95% within the past decade. This decline is largely due to incidental consumption of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory v...
In plants, tandem, segmental and whole-genome duplications are prevalent, resulting in large numbers of duplicate loci. Recent studies suggest that duplicate genes diverge predominantly through the partitionin...
The origin of microbial ORFans, ORFs having no detectable homology to other ORFs in the databases, is one of the unexplained puzzles of the post-genomic era. Several hypothesis on the origin of ORFans have bee...
Retrotransposons are commonly occurring eukaryotic transposable elements (TEs). Among these, long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons are the most abundant TEs and can comprise 50–90% of the genome in highe...
Despite a strong evolutionary pressure to reduce genome size, proteins vary in length over a surprisingly wide range also in very compact genomes. Here we investigated the evolutionary forces that act on prote...
Tenascins are a family of glycoproteins found primarily in the extracellular matrix of embryos where they help to regulate cell proliferation, adhesion and migration. In order to learn more about their origins...
Vps25p is the product of yeast gene VPS25 and is found in an endosomal sorting complex required for transport (ESCRT)-II, along with Vps22p and Vps36p. This complex is essential for sorting of ubiquitinated biosy...
Coordinately regulated genes often physically cluster in eukaryotic genomes, for reasons that remain unclear.
The Y model of resource allocation predicts a tradeoff between reproduction and survival. Environmental stress could affect a tradeoff between reproduction and survival, but the physiological mechanisms underl...
Understanding evolutionary processes that drive genome reduction requires determining the tempo (rate) and the mode (size and types of deletions) of gene losses. In this study, we analysed five endosymbiotic g...
Many mitochondrial genes, especially ribosomal protein genes, have been frequently transferred as functional entities to the nucleus during plant evolution, often by an RNA-mediated process. A notable case of ...
Since females often pay a higher cost for heterospecific matings, mate discrimination and species recognition are driven primarily by female choice. In contrast, frequent indiscriminate matings are hypothesize...
When females mate with different males, competition for fertilizations occurs after insemination. Such sperm competition is usually summarized at the level of the population or species by the parameter, P2, defin...
Orthologs and paralogs are widely used terms in modern comparative genomics. Existing procedures for resolving orthologous/paralogous relationships are often based on manual revision of clusters of orthologous...
The need to compare protein profiles frequently arises in various protein research areas: comparison of protein families, domain searches, resolution of orthology and paralogy. The existing fast algorithms can...
Alternatively spliced exons play an important role in the diversification of gene function in most metazoans and are highly regulated by conserved motifs in exons and introns. Two contradicting properties have...
Squeaker catfishes (Pisces, Mochokidae, Synodontis) are widely distributed throughout Africa and inhabit a biogeographic range similar to that of the exceptionally diverse cichlid fishes, including the three East...
While Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) have proven a viable and efficient way to sample genomes, particularly those for which whole-genome sequencing is impractical, phylogenetic analysis using ESTs remains diff...
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.