Page 84 of 95
Overlapped genes originate by a) loss of a stop codon among contiguous genes coded in different frames; b) shift to an upstream initiation codon of one of the contiguous genes; or c) by overprinting, whereby a...
Bacteria occur in facultative association and intracellular symbiosis with a diversity of eukaryotic hosts. Recently, we have helped to characterise an intracellular nitrogen fixing bacterium, the so-called sp...
The main prediction of life-history theory is that optimal energy allocated among the traits is related to the growth, maintenance and survival. It is hypothesized that the optimal resource allocated to immune...
There are around 400 internationally recognized dog breeds in the world today, with a remarkable diversity in size, shape, color and behavior. Breeds are considered to be uniform groups with similar physical c...
Bacterial penicillin-binding proteins and β-lactamases (PBP-βLs) constitute a large family of serine proteases that perform essential functions in the synthesis and maintenance of peptidoglycan. Intriguingly, ...
Gene duplication has been a fundamental process in the evolution of eukaryotic genomes. After duplication one copy (or both) can undergo divergence in sequence, expression pattern, and function. Two divergent ...
An increasing number of studies demonstrate that genetic differentiation and speciation in the sea occur over much smaller spatial scales than previously appreciated given the wide distribution range of many m...
Despite the prevalence of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in bacteria, to this date there were few studies on HGT in the context of gene expression, operons and protein-protein interactions. Using the recently ...
SplitsTree provides a framework for the calculation of phylogenetic trees and networks. It contains a wide variety of methods for the import/export, calculation and visualization of phylogenetic information. T...
Pleistocene glaciations had considerable impact on phylogeographic patterns within and among closely related species of many vertebrates. Compared to Europe and North America, research on the phylogeography of...
Evolutionary biologists are often misled by convergence of morphology and this has been common in the study of bird evolution. However, the use of molecular data sets have their own problems and phylogenies ba...
Hsp70 chaperones are required for key cellular processes and response to environmental changes and survival but they have not been fully characterized yet. The human hsp70-gene family has an unknown number of mem...
Insertion sequences (ISs) are small, mobile DNA entities able to expand in prokaryotic genomes and trigger important rearrangements. To understand their role in evolution, accurate IS taxonomy is essential. Th...
A major goal in the study of human evolution is to identify key genetic changes which occurred over the course of primate evolution. According to one school of thought, many such changes are likely to be found...
The neprilysin (M13) family of endopeptidases are zinc-metalloenzymes, the majority of which are type II integral membrane proteins. The best characterised of this family is neprilysin, which has important rol...
Organisms live in environments that vary. For life-history traits that vary across environments, fitness will be maximised when the phenotype is appropriately matched to the environmental conditions. For the f...
Our understanding of the eukaryotic tree of life and the tremendous diversity of microbial eukaryotes is in flux as additional genes and diverse taxa are sampled for molecular analyses. Despite instability in ...
Specialised leaf-eating is almost universally regarded as the ancestral state of all ruminants, yet little evidence can be cited in support of this assumption, apart from the fact that all early ruminants had ...
Although capable to evolve, viruses are generally considered non-living entities because they are acellular and devoid of metabolism. However, the recent publication of the genome sequence of the Mimivirus, a ...
Mutation rate (μ) per generation per locus is an important parameter in the models of population genetics. Studies on mutation rate and its variation are of significance to elucidate the extent and distributio...
Solanum carolinense (horsenettle) is a highly successful weed with a gametophytic self-incompatibility (SI) system. Previous studies reveal that the strength of SI in S. carolinense is a plastic trait, associated...
G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are one of the largest families of genes in mammals. Branchiostoma floridae (amphioxus) is one of the species most closely related species to vertebrates.
Many electron transport chain (ETC) genes show accelerated rates of nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions in anthropoid primate lineages, yet in non-anthropoid lineages the ETC proteins are typically highly c...
The mal genes that encode maltose transporters have undergone extensive lateral transfer among ancestors of the archaea Thermococcus litoralis and Pyrococcus furiosus. Bacterial hyperthermophiles of the order The...
Phylogenomic pipelines generate a large collection of phylogenetic trees that require manual inspection to answer questions about gene or genome evolution. A notable application of phylogenomics is to photosyn...
The molecular forms of Anopheles gambiae are undergoing speciation. They are characterized by a strong assortative mating and they display partial habitat segregation. The M form is mostly found in flooded/irriga...
Hydrophobins are proteins containing eight conserved cysteine residues that occur uniquely in mycelial fungi. Their main function is to confer hydrophobicity to fungal surfaces in contact with air or during at...
The origin of complex adaptations is one of the most controversial questions in biology. Environmental induction of novel phenotypes, where phenotypic retention of adaptive developmental variation is enabled b...
Co-expression of genes that physically cluster together is a common characteristic of eukaryotic transcriptomes. This organization of transcriptomes suggests that coordinated evolution of gene expression for c...
Matings between different Saccharomyces sensu stricto yeast species produce sexually sterile hybrids, so individuals should avoid mating with other species. Any mechanism that reduces the frequency of interspecif...
Alternative splicing has been shown to be one of the major evolutionary mechanisms for protein diversification and proteome expansion, since a considerable fraction of alternative splicing events appears to be...
Some of the most difficult phylogenetic questions in evolutionary biology involve identification of the free-living relatives of parasitic organisms, particularly those of parasitic flowering plants. Consequen...
The forests of the upper Amazon basin harbour some of the world's highest anuran species richness, but to date we have only the sparsest understanding of the distribution of genetic diversity within and among ...
The major lineages of eusocial insects, the ants, termites, stingless bees, honeybees and vespid wasps, all have ancient origins (≥ 65 mya) with no reversions to solitary behaviour. This has prompted the notio...
Among the long-standing conundrums of evolutionary theory, obligatory sex is one of the hardest. Current theory suggests multiple factors that might explain the benefits of sex when compared with complete asex...
Previous phylogenetic analyses of African elephants have included limited numbers of forest elephant samples. A large-scale assessment of mitochondrial DNA diversity in forest elephant populations here reveals...
Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is a pathogen associated molecular pattern (PAMP) of animal and plant pathogenic bacteria. Variation at the interstrain level is common in LPS biosynthetic gene clusters of animal path...
Although the patterns of co-substitutions in RNA is now well characterized, detection of coevolving positions in proteins remains a difficult task. It has been recognized that the signal is typically weak, due...
Molecular sequence data have become the standard in modern day phylogenetics. In particular, several long-standing questions of mammalian evolutionary history have been recently resolved thanks to the use of m...
A major cornerstone of evolutionary biology theory is the explanation of the emergence of cooperation in communities of selfish individuals. There is an unexplained tendency in the plant and animal world – wit...
The human chromosomes 2q, 7, 12q and 17q show extensive intra-genomic homology, containing duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate paralogous regions centered on the HOX gene clusters. The fact that two or mor...
Arthropods are infected by a wide diversity of maternally transmitted microbes. Some of these manipulate host reproduction to facilitate population invasion and persistence. Such parasites transmit vertically ...
Comparison of completely sequenced microbial genomes has revealed how fluid these genomes are. Detecting synteny blocks requires reliable methods to determining the orthologs among the whole set of homologs de...
Today it is widely accepted that plastids are of cyanobacterial origin. During their evolutionary integration into the metabolic and regulatory networks of the host cell the engulfed cyanobacteria lost their i...
Theory and artificial selection experiments show that recombination can promote adaptation by enhancing the efficacy of natural selection, but the extent to which recombination affects levels of adaptation acr...
Bird genomes have very different compositional structure compared with other warm-blooded animals. The variation in the base skew rules in the vertebrate genomes remains puzzling, but it must relate somehow to...
At the last glacial maximum, Fennoscandia was covered by an ice sheet while the tundra occupied most of the rest of northern Eurasia. More or less disjunct refugial populations of plants were dispersed in sout...
Y-chromosomal haplogroup (Y-HG) Q is suggested to originate in Asia and represent recent founder paternal Native American radiation into the Americas. This group is delineated into Q1, Q2 and Q3 subgroups defi...
Along the chromosome of the obligate intracellular bacteria Protochlamydia amoebophila UWE25, we recently described a genomic island Pam100G. It contains a tra unit likely involved in conjugative DNA transfer and...
The hydrogenosomes of the anaerobic ciliate Nyctotherus ovalis show how mitochondria can evolve into hydrogenosomes because they possess a mitochondrial genome and parts of an electron-transport chain on the one ...
View featured videos from across the BMC-series journals
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.