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The dynamics of antagonistic host-parasite coevolution are believed to be crucially dependent on the rate of migration between populations. We addressed how the rate of simultaneous migration of host and paras...
The compatible solute trehalose is a non-reducing disaccharide, which accumulates upon heat, cold or osmotic stress. It was commonly accepted that trehalose is only present in extremophiles or cryptobiotic org...
Comparative approaches using protostome and deuterostome data have greatly contributed to understanding gene function and organismal complexity. The family 2 G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are one of the ...
The highly homologous PE_PGRS (Proline-glutamic acid_polymorphic GC-rich repetitive sequence) genes are members of the PE multigene family which is found only in mycobacteria. PE genes are particularly abundan...
It is expected that genes that are expressed early in development and have a complex expression pattern are under strong purifying selection and thus evolve slowly. Hox genes fulfill these criteria and thus, shou...
The least squares (LS) method for constructing confidence sets of trees is closely related to LS tree building methods, in which the goodness of fit of the distances measured on the tree (patristic distances) ...
In order to study the dynamics of evolutionary change, 12 populations of E. coli B were serially propagated for 20,000 generations in minimal glucose medium at constant 37°C. Correlated changes in various other t...
The Caenorhabditis elegans genome is known to code for at least 1149 G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), but the GPCR(s) critical to the regulation of reproduction in this nematode are not yet known. This study ...
Soil-feeding termites are particularly interesting models for studying the effects of fragmentation, a natural or anthropic phenomenon described as promoting genetic differentiation. However, studying the link...
Glycolysis and subsequent fermentation is the main energy source for many anaerobic organisms. The glycolytic pathway consists of ten enzymatic steps which appear to be universal amongst eukaryotes. However, i...
Reliable taxonomic identification at the species level is the basis for many biological disciplines. In order to distinguish species, it is necessary that taxonomic characters allow for the separation of indiv...
To date, most fungal phylogenies have been derived from single gene comparisons, or from concatenated alignments of a small number of genes. The increase in fungal genome sequencing presents an opportunity to ...
The past decade has seen a remarkable increase in the number of recognized mouse lemur species (genus Microcebus). As recently as 1994, only two species of mouse lemur were recognized according to the rules of zo...
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...
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