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It has long been known that rates of synonymous substitutions are unusually low in mitochondrial genes of flowering and other land plants. Although two dramatic exceptions to this pattern have recently been re...
Considerable attention has focused on how selection on dispersal and other core life-history strategies (reproductive effort, survival ability, colonization capacity) may lead to so-called dispersal syndromes....
Molecular lock-and-key systems are common among reproductive proteins, yet their evolution remains a major puzzle in evolutionary biology. In the Brassicaceae, the genes encoding self-incompatibility have been...
The dusky dolphin (Lagenorhynchus obscurus) is distributed along temperate, coastal regions of New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and Peru where it feeds on schooling anchovy, sardines, and other small fishes ...
Analyses of complete genomes and large collections of gene transcripts have shown that most, if not all seed plants have undergone one or more genome duplications in their evolutionary past.
Development, differentiation and physiology of metazoans all depend on cell to cell communication and subsequent intracellular signal transduction. Often, these processes are orchestrated via sites of speciali...
A theoretical model of genetic redundancy has proposed that the fates of redundant genes depend on the degree of functional redundancy, and that functionally redundant genes will not be inherited together. How...
The lancelet Asymmetron inferum (subphylum Cephalochordata) was recently discovered on the ocean floor off the southwest coast of Japan at a depth of 229 m, in an anaerobic and sulfide-rich environment caused by ...
Aging refers to a decline in reproduction and survival with increasing age. According to evolutionary theory, aging evolves because selection late in life is weak and mutations exist whose deleterious effects ...
Molecular evolution is usually described assuming a neutral or weakly non-neutral substitution model. Recently, new data have become available on evolution of sequence regions under a selective pressure, e.g. ...
The geographic and ethnolinguistic differentiation of many African Y-chromosomal lineages provides an opportunity to evaluate human migration episodes and admixture processes, in a pan-continental context. The...
The mitochondrial genomes of snakes are characterized by an overall evolutionary rate that appears to be one of the most accelerated among vertebrates. They also possess other unusual features, including short...
Colonial invertebrates such as corals exhibit nested levels of modularity, imposing a challenge to the depiction of their morphological evolution. Comparisons among diverse Caribbean gorgonian corals suggest d...
Cryptic species are two or more distinct but morphologically similar species that were classified as a single species. During the past two decades we observed an exponential growth of publications on cryptic s...
The Class I cytokine receptors have a wide range of actions, including a major role in the development and function of immune and blood cells. However, the evolution of the genes encoding them remains poorly u...
Natural selection has traditionally been understood as a force responsible for pushing genes to states of higher translational efficiency, whereas lower translational efficiency has been explained by neutral m...
Onychophora (velvet worms) represent the most basal arthropod group and play a pivotal role in the current discussion on the evolution of nervous systems and segmentation in arthropods. Although there is a wea...
Helicoverpa armigera and H. zea are amongst the most significant polyphagous pest lepidopteran species in the Old and New Worlds respectively. Separation of H. armigera and H. zea is difficult and is usually only...
The analysis of genetic variation in populations of infectious agents may help us understand their epidemiology and evolution. Here we study a model for assessing the levels and patterns of genetic diversity i...
Termites of the subfamily Macrotermitinae live in a mutualistic symbiosis with basidiomycete fungi of the genus Termitomyces. Here, we explored interaction specificity in fungus-growing termites using samples fro...
Males of many species adjust their reproductive tactics with regard to their condition and status. For example, large males may develop weapons and fight for access to females, whereas small or undernourished ...
Action potential generation in excitable cells such as myocytes and neurons critically depends on voltage-gated sodium channels. In mammals, sodium channels exist as macromolecular complexes that include a por...
In contrast to DNA-mediated transposable elements (TEs), retrotransposons, particularly non-long terminal repeat retrotransposons (non-LTRs), are generally considered to have a much lower propensity towards ho...
The biosynthesis of aflatoxin (AF) involves over 20 enzymatic reactions in a complex polyketide pathway that converts acetate and malonate to the intermediates sterigmatocystin (ST) and O-methylsterigmatocystin (...
RNA molecules, through their dual appearance as sequence and structure, represent a suitable model to study evolutionary properties of quasispecies. The essential ingredient in this model is the differentiatio...
NADPH-oxidases (Nox) and the related Dual oxidases (Duox) play varied biological and pathological roles via regulated generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Members of the Nox/Duox family have been ident...
Recent publications concerning the interordinal phylogeny of placental mammals have converged on a common signal, consisting of four major radiations with some ambiguity regarding the placental root. The DNA d...
Ribosomal proteins (RPs) are key components of ribosomes, the cellular organelle responsible for protein biosynthesis in cells. Their levels can vary as a function of organism growth and development; however, ...
As bacteria, motile archaeal species swim by means of rotating flagellum structures driven by a proton gradient force. Interestingly, experimental data have shown that the archaeal flagellum is non-homologous ...
A controversial topic in evolutionary developmental biology is whether morphological diversification in natural populations can be driven by expansions and contractions of amino acid repeats in proteins. To pr...
The nematode Pristionchus pacificus has originally been developed as a satellite organism for comparison to Caenorhabditis elegans. A 10X coverage of the whole genome of P. pacificus is available, making P. pacif...
Septins are cytoskeletal GTPase proteins first discovered in the fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae where they organize the septum and link nuclear division with cell division. More recently septins have been found ...
Alu elements are a family of SINE retrotransposons in primates. They are classified into subfamilies according to specific diagnostic mutations from the general Alu consensus. It is now believed that there may...
The melanocortin (MC) receptors have a key role in regulating body weight and pigmentation. They belong to the rhodopsin family of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). The purpose of this study was to identify...
The mosquito Culex annulirostris Skuse (Diptera: Culicidae) is the major vector of endemic arboviruses in Australia and is also responsible for the establishment of the Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) in southe...
The sensory drive hypothesis predicts that divergent sensory adaptation in different habitats may lead to premating isolation upon secondary contact of populations. Speciation by sensory drive has traditionall...
RNA editing and alternative splicing play an important role in expanding protein diversity and this is well illustrated in studies of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs).
Since the mid 1990s populations of non-native apple snails (Ampullariidae) have been discovered with increasing frequency in the continental United States. Given the dramatic effects that introduced apple snai...
Chitinases (EC.3.2.1.14) hydrolyze the β-1,4-linkages in chitin, an abundant N-acetyl-β-D-glucosamine polysaccharide that is a structural component of protective biological matrices such as insect exoskeletons...
Molecular clock dates, which place the origin of animal phyla deep in the Precambrian, have been used to reject the hypothesis of a rapid evolutionary radiation of animal phyla supported by the fossil record. ...
Maximum parsimony is one of the most commonly used and extensively studied phylogeny reconstruction methods. While current evaluation methodologies such as computer simulations provide insight into how well ma...
Non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) retrotransposons are mobile genetic elements that propagate themselves by reverse transcription of an RNA intermediate. Non-LTR retrotransposons are known to evolve mainly vi...
Stowaway elements are short, non-autonomous DNA transposons categorized as miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs). The high MITE copy number in grass genomes suggests an active history of amplifi...
That pathogens and hosts coevolve is a powerful concept with broad theoretical and applied implications spanning from genetic theory to the medical and veterinary sciences, particularly in the context of infec...
Most phylogenetic studies using current methods have focused on primary DNA sequence information. However, RNA secondary structures are particularly useful in systematics because they include characteristics, ...
Lateral gene transfer is increasingly invoked to explain phylogenetic results that conflict with our understanding of organismal relationships. In eukaryotes, the most common observation interpreted in this wa...
Metallothionein (mt) transcription is elevated in heavy metal tolerant field populations of Orchesella cincta (Collembola). This suggests that natural selection acts on transcriptional regulation of mt in springt...
Species of the Drosophila obscura species group (e.g., D. pseudoobscura, D. subobscura) have served as favorable models in evolutionary studies since the 1930's. Despite numbers of studies conducted with varied t...
The walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma) and Norwegian pollock (T. finnmarchica) are confined to the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans, respectively, and considered as distinct species within the family ...
Paulinella chromatophora is a freshwater filose amoeba with photosynthetic endosymbionts (chromatophores) of cyanobacterial origin that are closely related to free-living Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus species...
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