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Leaves have highly diverse morphologies. However, with an evolutionary history of approximately 200 million years, leaves of the pine family are relatively monotonous and often collectively called “needles”, a...
The primordial eye field of the vertebrate embryo is a single entity of retinal progenitor cells spanning the anterior neural plate before bifurcating to form bilateral optic vesicles. Here we review fate mapp...
Mitochondrial function requires numerous genetic interactions between mitochondrial- and nuclear- encoded genes. While selection for optimal mitonuclear interactions should result in coevolution between both g...
Angiosperms employ an astonishing variety of visual and olfactory floral signals that are generally thought to evolve under natural selection. Those morphological and chemical traits can form highly correlated...
One hypothesis for the function of sleep is that it serves as a mechanism to conserve energy. Recent studies have suggested that increased sleep can be an adaptive mechanism to improve survival under food depr...
The family Labridae made up of 519 species in the world. The functional evolution of the feeding-related jaws leaded to differentiation of species, and the pharyngeal jaw apparatus evolved independently, but e...
The aragonite shelled, planktonic gastropod family Atlantidae (shelled heteropods) is likely to be one of the first groups to be impacted by imminent ocean changes, including ocean warming and ocean acidificat...
Hybridization is a central mechanism in evolution, producing new species or introducing important genetic variation into existing species. In plant-pathogenic fungi, adaptation and specialization to exploit a ...
The majority of parthenogenetic vertebrates derive from hybridization between sexually reproducing species, but the exact number of hybridization events ancestral to currently extant clonal lineages is difficu...
As global change and anthropogenic pressures continue to increase, conservation and management increasingly needs to consider species’ potential to adapt to novel environmental conditions. Therefore, it is imp...
The three main subspecies of house mice, Mus musculus castaneus, Mus musculus domesticus, and Mus musculus musculus, are estimated to have diverged ~ 350-500KYA. Resolution of the details of their evolutionary hi...
Many species are threatened with extinction as their population sizes decrease with changing environments or face novel pathogenic threats. A reduction of genetic diversity at major histocompatibility complex (MH...
The Chinese Isoetes L. are distributed in a stairway pattern: diploids in the high altitude and polyploids in the low altitude. The allopolyploid I. sinensis and its diploid parents I. yunguiensis and I. taiwanen...
Nervous system development is an interplay of many processes: the formation of individual neurons, which depends on whole-body and local patterning processes, and the coordinated growth of neurites and synapse...
Deep mitochondrial divergences were observed in Scandinavian populations of the terrestrial to semi-aquatic annelid Fridericia magna (Clitellata: Enchytraeidae). This raised the need for testing whether the taxon...
In this study, we investigate species limits in the cyanobacterial lichen genus Rostania (Collemataceae, Peltigerales, Lecanoromycetes). Four molecular markers (mtSSU rDNA, β-tubulin, MCM7, RPB2) were sequenced a...
Understanding the structure and variability of adaptive loci such as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes is a primary research goal for evolutionary and conservation genetics. Typically, classical...
The Cyanidiophyceae is an early-diverged red algal class that thrives in extreme conditions around acidic hot springs. Although this lineage has been highlighted as a model for understanding the biology of ext...
The study of speciation has expanded with the increasing availability and affordability of high-resolution genomic data. How the genome evolves throughout the process of divergence and which regions of the gen...
The distribution of genetic diversity and the underlying processes are important for conservation planning but are unknown for most species and have not been well studied in many regions. In East Asia, the Sic...
Island systems offer excellent opportunities for studying the evolutionary histories of species by virtue of their restricted size and easily identifiable barriers to gene flow. However, most studies investiga...
For decades, codon usage has been used as a measure of adaptation for translational efficiency and translation accuracy of a gene’s coding sequence. These patterns of codon usage reflect both the selective and...
Studies on marine community dynamics and population structures are limited by the lack of exhaustive knowledge on the larval dispersal component of connectivity. Genetic data represents a powerful tool in unde...
Amber has been reported from the Early Cretaceous Crato Formation, as isolated clasts or within plant tissues. Undescribed cones of uncertain gymnosperm affinity have also been recovered with amber preserved i...
The Caribbean offers a unique opportunity to study evolutionary dynamics in insular mammals. However, the recent extinction of most Caribbean non-volant mammals has obstructed evolutionary studies, and poor DN...
Pseudogamy is a reproductive system in which females rely on the sperm of males to activate their oocytes, generally parasitizing males of other species, but do not use the sperm DNA. The nematode Mesorhabditis b...
Microbiomes can have profound impacts on host biology and evolution, but to date, remain vastly understudied in spiders despite their unique and diverse predatory adaptations. This study evaluates closely rela...
Vertebrates exhibit diverse sex determination systems and reptiles stand out by having highly variable sex determinations that include temperature-dependent and genotypic sex determination (TSD and GSD, respec...
Women’s morphological femininity is perceived to develop under the influence of sex hormones and to serve as a cue of estradiol level, fertility and health in mating context. However, as the studies on direct ...
Distant hybridization between the sea urchin Heliocidaris crassispina (♀) and the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus intermedius (♂) was successfully performed under laboratory conditions. A new variety of hybrid sea ...
Under the threat of climate change populations can disperse, acclimatise or evolve in order to avoid fitness loss. In light of this, it is important to understand neutral gene flow patterns as a measure of dis...
Many animals rely heavily on olfaction to navigate their environment. Among rodents, olfaction is crucial for a wide range of social behaviors. The vomeronasal olfactory system in particular plays an important...
Convergent and parallel evolution provide unique insights into the mechanisms of natural selection. Some of the most striking convergent and parallel (collectively recurrent) amino acid substitutions in proteins ...
Was there a mid-Cenozoic vertebrate extinction and recovery event in Madagascar and, if so, what are its implications for the evolution of lemurs? The near lack of an early and mid-Cenozoic fossil record on Ma...
Chloroplast genome sequence data is very useful in studying/addressing the phylogeny of plants at various taxonomic ranks. However, there are no empirical observations on the patterns, directions, and mutation...
Adaptive radiations are characterized by extreme and/or iterative phenotypic divergence; however, such variation does not accumulate evenly across an organism. Instead, it is often partitioned into sub-units, ...
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.
The adaptive significance of phenotypic changes elicited by environmental conditions experienced early in life has long attracted attention in evolutionary biology. In this study, we used Drosophila melanogaster ...
Hypotrichia are a group with the most complex morphology and morphogenesis within the ciliated protists. The classification of Gastrostyla-like species, a taxonomically difficult group of hypotrichs with a common...
The SIAMESE (SIM) locus is a cell-cycle kinase inhibitor (CKI) gene that has to date been identified only in plants; it encodes a protein that promotes transformation from mitosis to endoreplication. Members of t...
Mate choice is a taxonomically wide-spread phenomenon, mostly exerted by females although male mate choice occurs as well. While costs and benefits of choosiness have been well studied, the underlying mechanis...
Tumors are widely recognized to progress through clonal evolution by sequentially acquiring selectively advantageous genetic alterations that significantly contribute to tumorigenesis and thus are termned driv...
Old World porcupines (Family: Hystricidae) are the third-largest rodents and inhabit southern Europe, Asia, and most regions of Africa. They are a typical indicator of warm climate and their distribution is re...
The blood-feeding behavior evolved multiple times in Insecta lineages and it represents an excellent opportunity to study patterns of convergent molecular evolution regarding this habit. In insects the expansi...
Although phylogenomic analyses are increasingly used to reveal evolutionary relationships among ciliates, relatively few nuclear protein-coding gene markers have been tested for their suitability as candidates...
ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters are involved in the active transportation of various endogenous or exogenous substances. Two ABCG2 gene subfamily members have been identified in birds. A detailed comparat...
Diverse architectures of nervous systems (NSs) such as a plexus in cnidarians or a more centralized nervous system (CNS) in insects and vertebrates are present across Metazoa, but it is unclear what selection ...
We have described the diversity of complete mtDNA sequences from ‘relic’ groups of the Russian Far East, primarily the Nivkhi (who speak a language isolate with no clear relatedness to any others) and Oroki of...
Quaternary climate fluctuations are an engine of biotic diversification. Global cooling cycles, such as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), are known to have fragmented the ranges of higher-latitude fauna and flor...
The origin of turtles and crocodiles and their easily recognized body forms dates to the Triassic and Jurassic. Despite their long-term success, extant species diversity is low, and endangerment is extremely h...
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