Skip to main content

Speciation and evolutionary genetics

This section considers studies into speciation and the role of inheritance and variation in individuals and among populations in evolution.

Page 6 of 7

  1. Adaptive radiation is the process by which a single ancestral species diversifies into many descendants adapted to exploit a wide range of habitats. The appearance of ecological opportunities, or the colonisat...

    Authors: Glenn Litsios, Carrie A Sims, Rafael O Wüest, Peter B Pearman, Niklaus E Zimmermann and Nicolas Salamin
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:212
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  2. Red deer (Cervus elaphus) have been an important human resource for millennia, experiencing intensive human influence through habitat alterations, hunting and translocation of animals. In this study we investigat...

    Authors: Jørgen Rosvold, Knut H Røed, Anne Karin Hufthammer, Reidar Andersen and Hans K Stenøien
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:191
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  3. In food-deceptive orchids of the genera Anacamptis, Neotinea and Orchis floral isolation has been shown to be weak, whereas late-acting reproductive barriers are mostly strong, often restricting hybridization to ...

    Authors: Hans Jacquemyn, Rein Brys, Olivier Honnay and Isabel Roldán-Ruiz
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:178
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  4. Genetic divergence during speciation with gene flow is heterogeneous across the genome, with some regions exhibiting stronger differentiation than others. Exceptionally differentiated regions are often assumed...

    Authors: Patrik Nosil, Thomas L Parchman, Jeffrey L Feder and Zach Gompert
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:164
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  5. Four of the five species of Telopea (Proteaceae) are distributed in a latitudinal replacement pattern on the south-eastern Australian mainland. In similar circumstances, a simple allopatric speciation model that ...

    Authors: Maurizio Rossetto, Chris B Allen, Katie AG Thurlby, Peter H Weston and Melita L Milner
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:149
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  6. The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is an important component of the vertebrate immune system and is frequently used to characterise adaptive variation in wild populations due to its co-evolution with p...

    Authors: Alexandra Jansen van Rensburg, Paulette Bloomer, Peter G Ryan and Bengt Hansson
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:143
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  7. Chemically mediated prezygotic barriers to reproduction likely play an important role in speciation. In facultatively sexual monogonont rotifers from the Brachionus plicatilis cryptic species complex, mate recogn...

    Authors: Kristin E Gribble and David B Mark Welch
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:134
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  8. Hybridisation is presumed to be an important mechanism in plant speciation and a creative evolutionary force often accompanied by polyploidisation and in some cases by apomixis. The Potentilla collina group const...

    Authors: Juraj Paule, Antonia Scherbantin and Christoph Dobeš
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:132
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  10. A number of studies have measured selection in nature to understand how populations adapt to their environment; however, the temporal dynamics of selection are rarely investigated. The aim of this study was to...

    Authors: Miyako Kodama, Jeffrey J Hard and Kerry A Naish
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:116
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  11. The loss of phenotypic characters is a common feature of evolution. Cave organisms provide excellent models for investigating the underlying patterns and processes governing the evolutionary loss of phenotypic...

    Authors: Joshua B Gross
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:105
    Content type: Review Published on:

  12. When simple sequence repeats are integrated into functional genes, they can potentially act as evolutionary ‘tuning knobs’, supplying abundant genetic variation with minimal risk of pleiotropic deleterious eff...

    Authors: Marie A Pointer, Jason M Kamilar, Vera Warmuth, Stephen G B Chester, Frédéric Delsuc, Nicholas I Mundy, Robert J Asher and Brenda J Bradley
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:103
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  13. Cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) are a group of adapted marine mammals with an enigmatic history of transition from terrestrial to full aquatic habitat and rapid radiation in waters around the world....

    Authors: Tong Shen, Shixia Xu, Xiaohong Wang, Wenhua Yu, Kaiya Zhou and Guang Yang
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:39
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  14. In the laboratory, the Drosophila melanogaster heat shock protein Hsp90 can buffer the phenotypic effects of genetic variation. Laboratory experiments either manipulate Hsp90 activity pharmacologically, or they i...

    Authors: Bing Chen and Andreas Wagner
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:25
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  15. Plasmodium vivax is the most widely distributed human malaria parasite outside of Africa, and its range extends well into the temperate zones. Previous studies provided evidence for vivax population differentiati...

    Authors: Miao Miao, Zhaoqing Yang, Harland Patch, Yaming Huang, Ananias A Escalante and Liwang Cui
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:22
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  16. In mammals, males typically have shorter lives than females. This difference is thought to be due to behavioural traits which enhance competitive abilities, and hence male reproductive success, but impair surv...

    Authors: Helmut Schaschl, Franz Suchentrunk, David L Morris, Hichem Ben Slimen, Steve Smith and Walter Arnold
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:20
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  17. Cyclical parthenogenetic water fleas of the genus Daphnia have become a prominent model organism in ecology and evolution. In the past, analyses of their population structure have been limited by the prevailing u...

    Authors: Mingbo Yin, Adam Petrusek, Jaromir Seda and Justyna Wolinska
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:12
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  18. Cave animals converge evolutionarily on a suite of troglomorphic traits, the best known of which are eyelessness and depigmentation. We studied 11 cave and 10 surface populations of Astyanax mexicanus in order to...

    Authors: Martina Bradic, Peter Beerli, Francisco J García-de León, Sarai Esquivel-Bobadilla and Richard L Borowsky
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:9
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  19. Species complexes or aggregates consist of a set of closely related species often of different ploidy levels, whose relationships are difficult to reconstruct. The N Hemisphere Achillea millefolium aggregate exhi...

    Authors: Yan-Ping Guo, Shuai-Zhen Wang, Claus Vogl and Friedrich Ehrendorfer
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2012 12:2
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  20. Deep-sea hydrothermal vents provide patchy, ephemeral habitats for specialized communities of animals that depend on chemoautotrophic primary production. Unlike eastern Pacific hydrothermal vents, where popula...

    Authors: Andrew D Thaler, Kevin Zelnio, William Saleu, Thomas F Schultz, Jens Carlsson, Clifford Cunningham, Robert C Vrijenhoek and Cindy L Van Dover
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:372
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  21. Local Mate Competition (LMC) theory predicts a female should produce a more female-biased sex ratio if her sons compete with each other for mates. Because it provides quantitative predictions that can be exper...

    Authors: Laurent Keller, Katharina Peer, Christian Bernasconi, Michael Taborsky and David M Shuker
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:359
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  22. Cryptic population structure can be an indicator of incipient speciation or historical processes. We investigated a previously documented deep break in the mitochondrial haplotypes of Heliconius erato chestertoni...

    Authors: Astrid G Muñoz, Simon W Baxter, Mauricio Linares and Chris D Jiggins
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:358
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  23. The Lysiphlebus fabarum group is a taxonomically poorly resolved complex of aphid parasitoids, presently split into three described species that comprise sexual (arrhenotokous) and asexual (thelytokous) lineages ...

    Authors: Christoph Sandrock, Bettina E Schirrmeister and Christoph Vorburger
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:348
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  24. Effects of polyploidisation on gene flow between natural populations are little known. Central European diploid and tetraploid populations of Arabidopsis arenosa and A. lyrata are here used to study interspecific...

    Authors: Marte H Jørgensen, Dorothee Ehrich, Roswitha Schmickl, Marcus A Koch and Anne K Brysting
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:346
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  25. It is a common observation in evolutionary studies that larger, more ornamented or earlier breeding individuals have higher fitness, but that body size, ornamentation or breeding time does not change despite o...

    Authors: Elisabeth Bolund, Holger Schielzeth and Wolfgang Forstmeier
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:327
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  26. Understanding the evolution of cultivated barley is important for two reasons. First, the evolutionary relationships between different landraces might provide information on the spread and subsequent developme...

    Authors: Huw Jones, Peter Civáň, James Cockram, Fiona J Leigh, Lydia MJ Smith, Martin K Jones, Michael P Charles, José-Luis Molina-Cano, Wayne Powell, Glynis Jones and Terence A Brown
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:320
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  27. Routine trichromatic color vision is a characteristic feature of catarrhines (humans, apes and Old World monkeys). This is enabled by L and M opsin genes arrayed on the X chromosome and an autosomal S opsin ge...

    Authors: Tomohide Hiwatashi, Akichika Mikami, Takafumi Katsumura, Bambang Suryobroto, Dyah Perwitasari-Farajallah, Suchinda Malaivijitnond, Boripat Siriaroonrat, Hiroki Oota, Shunji Goto and Shoji Kawamura
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:312
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  28. Within the Coleoptera, the largest order in the animal kingdom, the exclusively herbivorous Chrysomelidae are recognized as one of the most species rich beetle families. The evolutionary processes that have fu...

    Authors: Matthias Borer, Tom van Noort, Nils Arrigo, Sven Buerki and Nadir Alvarez
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:310
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  29. Divergent natural selection across environmental gradients has been acknowledged as a major driver of population and species divergence, however its role in the diversification of scleractinian corals remains ...

    Authors: Pim Bongaerts, Cynthia Riginos, Kyra B Hay, Madeleine JH van Oppen, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and Sophie Dove
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:303
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  30. Several mechanistic models aim to explain the diversification of the multitude of endemic species on Madagascar. The island's biogeographic history probably offered numerous opportunities for secondary contact...

    Authors: Andreas Hapke, Mark Gligor, S Jacques Rakotondranary, David Rosenkranz and Oliver Zupke
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:297
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  31. The tropical rain forests (TRF) of Africa are the second largest block of this biome after the Amazon and exhibit high levels of plant endemism and diversity. Two main hypotheses have been advanced to explain ...

    Authors: Thomas LP Couvreur, Holly Porter-Morgan, Jan J Wieringa and Lars W Chatrou
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:296
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  32. Apomixis is an intriguing trait in plants that results in maternal clones through seed reproduction. Apomixis is an elusive, but potentially revolutionary, trait for plant breeding and hybrid seed production. ...

    Authors: Yukio Akiyama, Shailendra Goel, Joann A Conner, Wayne W Hanna, Hitomi Yamada-Akiyama and Peggy Ozias-Akins
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:289
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  33. For millennia, the southern part of the Mesopotamia has been a wetland region generated by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers before flowing into the Gulf. This area has been occupied by human communities since a...

    Authors: Nadia Al-Zahery, Maria Pala, Vincenza Battaglia, Viola Grugni, Mohammed A Hamod, Baharak Hooshiar Kashani, Anna Olivieri, Antonio Torroni, Augusta S Santachiara-Benerecetti and Ornella Semino
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:288
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  34. Extinction and re-colonisation of local populations is common in ephemeral habitats such as temporary streams. In most cases, such population turnover leads to reduced genetic diversity within populations and ...

    Authors: Lisa NS Shama, Karen B Kubow, Jukka Jokela and Christopher T Robinson
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:278
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  35. The classical perspective that interspecific hybridization in animals is rare has been changing due to a growing list of empirical examples showing the occurrence of gene flow between closely related species. ...

    Authors: Fernando Sequeira, Davidson Sodré, Nuno Ferrand, José AR Bernardi, Iracilda Sampaio, Horacio Schneider and Marcelo Vallinoto
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:264
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  36. The second Internal Transcriber Spacer (ITS2) is a fast evolving part of the nuclear-encoded rRNA operon located between the 5.8S and 28S rRNA genes. Based on crossing experiments it has been proposed that eve...

    Authors: Lenka Caisová, Birger Marin and Michael Melkonian
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:262
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  38. Ring species, exemplified by salamanders of the Ensatina eschscholtzii complex, represent a special window into the speciation process because they allow the history of species formation to be traced back in time...

    Authors: Thomas J Devitt, Stuart JE Baird and Craig Moritz
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:245
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  39. The population structure of cyclical parthenogens such as water fleas is strongly influenced by the frequency of alternations between sexual and asexual (parthenogenetic) reproduction, which may differ among p...

    Authors: Eva Hamrová, Joachim Mergeay and Adam Petrusek
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:231
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  40. We studied patterns of molecular adaptation in the wild Mediterranean legume Medicago truncatula. We focused on two phenotypic traits that are not functionally linked: flowering time and perception of symbiotic m...

    Authors: Stéphane De Mita, Nathalie Chantret, Karine Loridon, Joëlle Ronfort and Thomas Bataillon
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:229
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  42. Ecological specializations such as antipredator defense can reinforce morphological and distributional divergence within hybridizing species. Two hybridizing species of Daphnia (D. galeata and D. dentifera) are d...

    Authors: Seiji Ishida, Akiko Takahashi, Noe Matsushima, Jun Yokoyama, Wataru Makino, Jotaro Urabe and Masakado Kawata
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:209
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  43. Fragmentation of terrestrial ecosystems has had detrimental effects on metapopulations of habitat specialists. Maculinea butterflies have been particularly affected because of their specialized lifecycles, requir...

    Authors: Line V Ugelvig, Per S Nielsen, Jacobus J Boomsma and David R Nash
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:201
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  44. DNA-based studies have demonstrated that avian genetic mating systems vary widely, with many species deviating from long-assumed monogamy by practicing extra-pair paternity and conspecific brood parasitism. Co...

    Authors: Carolina I Miño, Michael A Russello, Priscila F Mussi Gonçalves and Silvia N Del Lama
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:196
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  45. Reproductive isolation (RI) is widely accepted as an important "check point" in the diversification process, since it defines irreversible evolutionary trajectories. Much less consensus exists about the proces...

    Authors: Ricardo J Pereira, William B Monahan and David B Wake
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:194
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  46. Phenotypic similarities among cave-dwelling animals displaying troglomorphic characters (e.g. reduced eyes and lack of pigmentation) have induced a long-term discussion about the forces driving convergent evol...

    Authors: Luise Kruckenhauser, Elisabeth Haring, Robert Seemann and Helmut Sattmann
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:172
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  47. The cosmopolitan freshwater snail Physa acuta has recently found widespread use as a model organism for the study of mating systems and reproductive allocation. Mitochondrial DNA phylogenies suggest that Physa ca...

    Authors: Robert T Dillon Jr, Amy R Wethington and Charles Lydeard
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:144
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  48. Genes at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) are known for high levels of polymorphism maintained by balancing selection. In small or bottlenecked populations, however, genetic drift may be strong enoug...

    Authors: Jennifer L Bollmer, Joshua M Hull, Holly B Ernest, José H Sarasola and Patricia G Parker
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:143
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  49. Ecological character displacement is a process of phenotypic differentiation of sympatric populations caused by interspecific competition. Such differentiation could facilitate speciation by enhancing reproduc...

    Authors: Radka Reifová, Jiří Reif, Marcin Antczak and Michael W Nachman
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:138
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  50. Factors and processes shaping the population structure and spatial distribution of genetic diversity across a species' distribution range are important in determining the range limits. We comprehensively analy...

    Authors: Markus Pfenninger, Moritz Salinger, Timm Haun and Barbara Feldmeyer
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011 11:135
    Content type: Research article Published on:
Submit manuscript

Annual Journal Metrics

  • 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. 

Follow

Sign up for article alerts and news from this journal

BMC Ecology and Evolution

ISSN: 2730-7182

Contact us