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Calcium signaling plays a prominent role in plants for coordinating a wide range of developmental processes and responses to environmental cues. Stimulus-specific generation of intracellular calcium transients...
Evolutionary analyses of the largest subunit of RNA polymerase II (RPB1) have yielded important and at times provocative results. One particularly troublesome outcome is the consistent inference of independent...
Myotragus balearicus was an endemic bovid from the Balearic Islands (Western Mediterranean) that became extinct around 6,000-4,000 years ago. The Myotragus evolutionary lineage became isolated in the islands most...
Merlin, the product of the Neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) tumor suppressor gene, belongs to the ezrin-radixin-moesin (ERM) subgroup of the protein 4.1 superfamily, which links cell surface glycoproteins to the ac...
Group I introns have spread into over 90 different sites in nuclear ribosomal DNA (rDNA) with greater than 1700 introns reported in these genes. These ribozymes generally spread through endonuclease-mediated i...
In Drosophila melanogaster the Enhancer of split-Complex [E(spl)-C] consists of seven highly related genes encoding basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) repressors and intermingled, four genes that belong to the Bearded...
Long alpha-helical coiled-coil proteins are involved in diverse organizational and regulatory processes in eukaryotic cells. They provide cables and networks in the cyto- and nucleoskeleton, molecular scaffold...
Adaptive evolution appears to be a common feature of reproductive proteins across a very wide range of organisms. A promising way of addressing the evolutionary forces responsible for this general phenomenon i...
The evolution of within-host growth rates by parasites is expected to depend on a trade-off between propagule production and virulence. The presence of coinfections, however, is thought to alter this trade-off...
Molecular phylogenetic methods are based on alignments of nucleic or peptidic sequences. The tremendous increase in molecular data permits phylogenetic analyses of very long sequences and of many species, but ...
Prior to the sequencing of the human genome it was typically assumed that, tandem duplication aside, gene order is for the most part random. Numerous observers, however, highlighted instances in which a ligand...
Condition-dependence is a ubiquitous feature of animal life histories and has important implications for both natural and sexual selection. Mate choice, for instance, is typically based on condition-dependent ...
Confronted with well-defended, novel hosts, should an enemy invest in avoidance of these hosts (behavioral adaptation), neutralization of the defensive innovation (physiological adaptation) or both? Although simu...
Costly structures need to represent an adaptive advantage in order to be maintained over evolutionary times. Contrary to many other conspicuous shell ornamentations of gastropods, the haired shells of several ...
For parsimony analyses, the most common way to estimate confidence is by resampling plans (nonparametric bootstrap, jackknife), and Bremer support (Decay indices). The recent literature reveals that parameter ...
Thermus thermophilus and Deinococcus radiodurans belong to a distinct bacterial clade but have remarkably different phenotypes. T. thermophilus is a thermophile, which is relatively sensitive to ionizing radiatio...
Plastid-bearing cryptophytes like Cryptomonas contain four genomes in a cell, the nucleus, the nucleomorph, the plastid genome and the mitochondrial genome. Comparative phylogenetic analyses encompassing DNA sequ...
Comparative genomics has provided valuable insights into the nature of gene sequence variation and chromosomal organization of closely related bacterial species. However, questions about the biological signifi...
The identification of sequence innovations in the genomes of mammals facilitates understanding of human gene function, as well as sheds light on the molecular mechanisms which underlie these changes. Although ...
HIV-1 is a retrovirus with high rate of recombination. Increasing experimental studies in vitro indicated that local hairpin structure of RNA was associated with recombination by favoring RT pausing and promoting...
The advent of live-attenuated vaccines against measles virus during the 1960'ies changed the circulation dynamics of the virus. Earlier the virus was indigenous to countries worldwide, but now it is mediated b...
Alu elements are Short INterspersed Elements (SINEs) in primate genomes that have proven useful as markers for studying genome evolution, population biology and phylogenetics. Most of these applications, however,...
Probabilistic methods have progressively supplanted the Maximum Parsimony (MP) method for inferring phylogenetic trees. One of the major reasons for this shift was that MP is much more sensitive to the Long Br...
The modern wildherd of the tundra muskox (Ovibos moschatus) is native only to the New World (northern North America and Greenland), and its genetic diversity is notably low. However, like several other megafaunal...
Translation initiation in eukaryotes involves the recruitment of mRNA to the ribosome which is controlled by the translation factor eIF4E. eIF4E binds to the 5'-m7Gppp cap-structure of mRNA. Three dimensional str...
We investigated genetic variation of a major histcompatibility complex (MHC) pseudogene (Anvi-DAB1) in the little greenbul (Andropadus virens) from four localities in Cameroon and one in Ivory Coast, West Africa....
The intergenic spacer of the ribosomal genes in eukaryotes (IGS) contains duplications of the core transcription promoter. The number of these duplicated promoters, as measured by the IGS length, appears to be...
Only one spliceosomal-type intron has previously been identified in the unicellular eukaryotic parasite, Giardia lamblia (a diplomonad). This intron is only 35 nucleotides in length and is unusual in possessing a...
A number of recent papers have cast doubt on the applicability of the quasispecies concept to virus evolution, and have argued that population genetics is a more appropriate framework to describe virus evoluti...
The cytochrome P450 aromatase (CYP19), catalyses the aromatisation of androgens to estrogens, a key mechanism in vertebrate reproductive physiology. A current evolutionary hypothesis suggests that CYP19 gene aros...
Completed genomes and environmental genomic sequences are bringing a significant contribution to understanding the evolution of gene families, microbial metabolism and community eco-physiology. Here, we used c...
The G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) constitute one of the largest and most ancient superfamilies of membrane proteins. They play a central role in physiological processes affecting almost all aspects of th...
The genes for salivary androgen-binding protein (ABP) subunits have been evolving rapidly in ancestors of the house mouse Mus musculus, as evidenced both by recent and extensive gene duplication and by high ratio...
Rodent and primate pregnancy-specific glycoprotein (PSG) gene families have expanded independently from a common ancestor and are expressed virtually exclusively in placental trophoblasts. However, within each sp...
Although recent molecular phylogenetic studies have identified the photosynthetic relatives of several enigmatic holoparasitic angiosperms, uncertainty remains for the last parasitic plant order, Balanophorale...
Internal reproductive organ size is an important determinant of male reproductive success. While the response of testis length to variation in the intensity of sperm competition is well documented across many ...
The concept of a genomic core, defined as the set of genes ubiquitous in all genomes of a monophyletic group, has become crucial in comparative and evolutionary genomics. However, it is still a matter of debat...
Wolbachia are endosymbiotic bacteria that commonly infect numerous arthropods. Despite their broad taxonomic distribution, the transmission patterns of these bacteria within and among host species are not well un...
Although there are now about 200 complete bacterial genomes in GenBank, deep bacterial phylogeny remains a difficult problem, due to confounding horizontal gene transfers and other phylogenetic "noise". Previo...
Since Darwin's Origin of Species, reconstructing the Tree of Life has been a goal of evolutionists, and tree-thinking has become a major concept of evolutionary biology. Practically, building the Tree of Life ...
We have examined the evolution of the genes at the major human β-defensin locus and the orthologous loci in a range of other primates and mouse. For the first time these data allow us to examine selective epis...
Integrins are a functionally significant family of metazoan cell surface adhesion receptors. The receptors are dimers composed of an alpha and a beta chain. Vertebrate genomes encode an expanded set of integri...
The chromosomes of higher plants are littered with retrotransposons that, in many cases, constitute as much as 80% of plant genomes. Long terminal repeat retrotransposons have been especially successful coloni...
To help conservation programs of the endangered spur-thighed tortoise and to gain better insight into its systematics, genetic variation and evolution in the tortoise species Testudo graeca (Testudines: Testudini...
Gene duplication has been suggested to be an important process in the generation of evolutionary novelty. Neofunctionalization, as an adaptive process where one copy mutates into a function that was not presen...
When organismal phylogenies based on sequences of single marker genes are poorly resolved, a logical approach is to add more markers, on the assumption that weak but congruent phylogenetic signal will be reinf...
Analysis of human complete mitochondrial DNA sequences has largely contributed to resolve phylogenies and antiquity of different lineages belonging to the majorhaplogroups L, N and M (East-Asian lineages). In ...
Evolutionary conflicts of interest between the sexes often lead to co-evolutionary arms races consisting of repeated arisal of traits advantageous for one sex but harmful to the other sex, and counter-adaptati...
The modeling of complex systems, as disparate as the World Wide Web and the cellular metabolism, as networks has recently uncovered a set of generic organizing principles: Most of these systems are scale-free ...
Protein interaction networks aim to summarize the complex interplay of proteins in an organism. Early studies suggested that the position of a protein in the network determines its evolutionary rate but there ...
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