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Gene duplication is an important mechanism that can lead to the emergence of new functions during evolution. The impact of duplication on the mode of gene evolution has been the subject of several theoretical ...
The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) caused a severe global epidemic in 2003 which led to hundreds of deaths and many thousands of hospitalizations. The virus causing SARS was identified as...
In phylogenetic analysis we face the problem that several subclade topologies are known or easily inferred and well supported by bootstrap analysis, but basal branching patterns cannot be unambiguously estimat...
Codon usage bias has been widely reported to correlate with GC composition. However, the quantitative relationship between codon usage bias and GC composition across species has not been reported.
Most analysis programs for inferring molecular phylogenies are difficult to use, in particular for researchers with little programming experience.
The Retraction Note to this article has been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2015 15:243
Mitochondrial DNA has been detected in the nuclear genome of eukaryotes as pseudogenes, or Numts. Human and plant genomes harbor a large number of Numts, some of which have high similarity to mitochondrial fragme...
Examination of ancient gene families can provide an insight into how the evolution of gene structure can relate to function. Functional homologs of the evolutionarily conserved transforming acidic coiled coil (TA...
The North American Agalinis are representatives of a taxonomically difficult group that has been subject to extensive taxonomic revision from species level through higher sub-generic designations (e.g., subsectio...
A response to Fraser HB, Hirsh AE: Evolutionary rate depends on number of protein-protein interactions independently of gene expression level. BMC Evol Biol 2004, 4: 13
Whether or not a protein's number of physical interactions with other proteins plays a role in determining its rate of evolution has been a contentious issue. A recent analysis suggested that the observed corr...
Anopheles (Nyssorhynchus) albitarsis (Diptera: Culicidae) is one of the very few South American mosquito vectors of malaria successfully colonized in the laboratory. These vectors are very hard to breed because t...
Comparative genomic data among organisms allow the reconstruction of their phylogenies and evolutionary time scales. Molecular timings have been recently used to suggest that environmental global change have s...
Plant natriuretic peptides (PNPs) are systemically mobile molecules that regulate homeostasis at nanomolar concentrations. PNPs are up-regulated under conditions of osmotic stress and PNP-dependent processes i...
Gene duplication followed by the functional divergence of the resulting pair of paralogous proteins is a major force shaping molecular networks in living organisms. Recent species-wide data for protein-protein...
Social wasps in the subfamily Polistinae (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) have been important in studies of the evolution of sociality, kin selection, and within colony conflicts of interest. These studies have general...
Iron-sulfur (FeS) proteins are present in all living organisms and play important roles in electron transport and metalloenzyme catalysis. The maturation of FeS proteins in eukaryotes is an essential function ...
Inferences about protein function are often made based on sequence homology to other gene products of known activities. This approach is valuable for small families of conserved proteins but can be difficult t...
Insecticide resistance is now common in insects due to the frequent use of chemicals to control them, which provides a useful tool to study the adaptation of eukaryotic genome to new environments. Although num...
Organophosphate and carbamate insecticides irreversibly inhibit acetylcholinesterase causing death of insects. Resistance-modified acetylcholinesterases(AChEs) have been described in many insect species and se...
Vertebrate genes often appear to cluster within the background of nontranscribed genomic DNA. Here an analysis of the physical distribution of gene structures on human chromosome 7 was performed to confirm the...
The pattern and timing of the rise in complex multicellular life during Earth's history has not been established. Great disparity persists between the pattern suggested by the fossil record and that estimated ...
Theoretical studies suggest that direct and indirect selection have the potential to cause substantial evolutionary change in female mate choice. Similarly, sexual selection is considered a strong force in the...
Understanding the diversity of interactions between RNA aptamers and nucleotide cofactors promises both to facilitate the design of new RNA enzymes that utilize these cofactors and to constrain models of RNA W...
Many studies in evolutionary biology and genetics are limited by the rate at which phenotypic information can be acquired. The wings of Drosophila species are a favorable target for automated analysis because ...
The widespread introduction of amino acid substitutions into organismal proteomes has occurred during natural evolution, but has been difficult to achieve by directed evolution. The adaptation of the translati...
Models of the maintenance of sex predict that one reproductive strategy, sexual or parthenogenetic, should outcompete the other. Distribution patterns may reflect the outcome of this competition as well as the...
Analytical methods have been proposed to determine whether there are evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) for a trait of ecological significance, or whether there is disruptive selection in a population appr...
Several studies have suggested that proteins that interact with more partners evolve more slowly. The strength and validity of this association has been called into question. Here we investigate how biases in ...
Drosophila nasuta nasuta (2n = 8) and Drosophila nasuta albomicans (2n = 6) are a pair of sibling allopatric chromosomal cross-fertile races of the nasuta subgroup of immigrans species group of Drosophila. Interr...
The binding sites of sequence specific transcription factors are an important and relatively well-understood class of functional non-coding DNAs. Although a wide variety of experimental and computational metho...
The ars gene system provides arsenic resistance for a variety of microorganisms and can be chromosomal or plasmid-borne. The arsC gene, which codes for an arsenate reductase is essential for arsenate resistance a...
Dof proteins are a family of plant-specific transcription factors that contain a particular class of zinc-finger DNA-binding domain. Members of this family have been found to play diverse roles in gene regulat...
Phylogenetic hypotheses of higher-level relationships in the order Charadriiformes based on morphological data, partly disagree with those based on DNA-DNA hybridisation data. So far, these relationships have ...
Genomic imprinting refers to the differential expression of genes inherited from the mother and father (matrigenes and patrigenes). The kinship theory of genomic imprinting treats parent-specific gene expressi...
Lateral gene transfer can introduce genes with novel functions into genomes or replace genes with functionally similar orthologs or paralogs. Here we present a study of the occurrence of the latter gene replac...
Many groups of land snails show great interspecific diversity in shell ornamentation, which may include spines on the shell and flanges on the aperture. Such structures have been explained as camouflage or def...
A key event in the origin of life on this planet has been formation of self-replicating RNA-type molecules, which were complex enough to undergo a Darwinian-type evolution (origin of the "RNA world"). However,...
It has been shown for an evolutionarily distant genomic comparison that the number of protein-protein interactions a protein has correlates negatively with their rates of evolution. However, the generality of ...
Swarm-founding epiponine wasps are an intriguing group of social insects in which colonies are polygynic (several queens share reproduction) and differentiation between castes is often not obvious. However, ca...
Aminoadipate reductase (Lys2) is a fungal-specific protein. This enzyme contains an adenylating domain. A similar primary structure can be found in some bacterial antibiotic/peptide synthetases. In this study,...
The study of organisms with restricted dispersal abilities and presence in the fossil record is particularly adequate to understand the impact of climate changes on the distribution and genetic structure of sp...
We have studied spliceosomal introns in the ribosomal (r)RNA of fungi to discover the forces that guide their insertion and fixation.
An important component of sexual selection arises because females obtain viability benefits for their offspring from their mate choice. Females choosing extra-pair fertilization generally favor males with exag...
The original article was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2003 3:1
Runx genes encode proteins defined by the highly conserved Runt DNA-binding domain. Studies of Runx genes and proteins in model organisms indicate that they are key transcriptional regulators of animal develop...
The rate at which fitness declines as an organism's genome accumulates random mutations is an important variable in several evolutionary theories. At an intuitive level, it might seem natural that random mutat...
Comparative analysis of sequenced genomes reveals numerous instances of apparent horizontal gene transfer (HGT), at least in prokaryotes, and indicates that lineage-specific gene loss might have been even more...
It has been suggested that rates of protein evolution are influenced, to a great extent, by the proportion of amino acid residues that are directly involved in protein function. In agreement with this hypothes...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2003 3:5
In general, the length of a protein sequence is determined by its function and the wide variance in the lengths of an organism's proteins reflects the diversity of specific functional roles for these proteins....
Experimental populations of Escherichia coli have evolved for 20,000 generations in a uniform environment. Their rate of improvement, as measured in competitions with the ancestor in that environment, has decline...
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