Featured videos
View featured videos from across the BMC-series journals
Page 95 of 98
The family Accipitridae (hawks, eagles and Old World vultures) represents a large radiation of predatory birds with an almost global distribution, although most species of this family occur in the Neotropics. ...
The recently emerged protein interaction network paradigm can provide novel and important insights into the innerworkings of a cell. Yet, the heavy burden of both false positive and false negative protein-prot...
The rate of molecular evolution varies widely between proteins, both within and among lineages. To what extent is this variation influenced by genome-wide, lineage-specific effects? To answer this question, we...
Recently, HEN1 protein from Arabidopsis thaliana was discovered as an essential enzyme in plant microRNA (miRNA) biogenesis. HEN1 transfers a methyl group from S-adenosylmethionine to the 2'-OH or 3'-OH group of ...
Gene losses played a role which may have been as important as gene and genome duplications and rearrangements, in modelling today species' genomes from a common ancestral set of genes. The set and diversity of...
Plant-feeding insects make up a large part of earth's total biodiversity. While it has been shown that herbivory has repeatedly led to increased diversification rates in insects, there has been no compelling e...
Integrons are genetic elements capable of the acquisition, rearrangement and expression of genes contained in gene cassettes. Gene cassettes generally consist of a promoterless gene associated with a recombina...
Genomic islands are regions of bacterial genomes that have been acquired by horizontal transfer and often contain blocks of genes that function together for specific processes. Recently, it has become clear th...
Phylogenies are commonly used to analyse the differences between genes, genomes and species. Patristic distances calculated from tree branch lengths describe the amount of genetic change represented by a tree ...
Rates of synonymous nucleotide substitutions are, in general, exceptionally low in plant mitochondrial genomes, several times lower than in chloroplast genomes, 10–20 times lower than in plant nuclear genomes,...
Calcium signaling plays a prominent role in plants for coordinating a wide range of developmental processes and responses to environmental cues. Stimulus-specific generation of intracellular calcium transients...
Evolutionary analyses of the largest subunit of RNA polymerase II (RPB1) have yielded important and at times provocative results. One particularly troublesome outcome is the consistent inference of independent...
Myotragus balearicus was an endemic bovid from the Balearic Islands (Western Mediterranean) that became extinct around 6,000-4,000 years ago. The Myotragus evolutionary lineage became isolated in the islands most...
Merlin, the product of the Neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) tumor suppressor gene, belongs to the ezrin-radixin-moesin (ERM) subgroup of the protein 4.1 superfamily, which links cell surface glycoproteins to the ac...
Group I introns have spread into over 90 different sites in nuclear ribosomal DNA (rDNA) with greater than 1700 introns reported in these genes. These ribozymes generally spread through endonuclease-mediated i...
In Drosophila melanogaster the Enhancer of split-Complex [E(spl)-C] consists of seven highly related genes encoding basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) repressors and intermingled, four genes that belong to the Bearded...
Long alpha-helical coiled-coil proteins are involved in diverse organizational and regulatory processes in eukaryotic cells. They provide cables and networks in the cyto- and nucleoskeleton, molecular scaffold...
Adaptive evolution appears to be a common feature of reproductive proteins across a very wide range of organisms. A promising way of addressing the evolutionary forces responsible for this general phenomenon i...
The evolution of within-host growth rates by parasites is expected to depend on a trade-off between propagule production and virulence. The presence of coinfections, however, is thought to alter this trade-off...
Molecular phylogenetic methods are based on alignments of nucleic or peptidic sequences. The tremendous increase in molecular data permits phylogenetic analyses of very long sequences and of many species, but ...
Prior to the sequencing of the human genome it was typically assumed that, tandem duplication aside, gene order is for the most part random. Numerous observers, however, highlighted instances in which a ligand...
Condition-dependence is a ubiquitous feature of animal life histories and has important implications for both natural and sexual selection. Mate choice, for instance, is typically based on condition-dependent ...
Confronted with well-defended, novel hosts, should an enemy invest in avoidance of these hosts (behavioral adaptation), neutralization of the defensive innovation (physiological adaptation) or both? Although simu...
Costly structures need to represent an adaptive advantage in order to be maintained over evolutionary times. Contrary to many other conspicuous shell ornamentations of gastropods, the haired shells of several ...
For parsimony analyses, the most common way to estimate confidence is by resampling plans (nonparametric bootstrap, jackknife), and Bremer support (Decay indices). The recent literature reveals that parameter ...
Thermus thermophilus and Deinococcus radiodurans belong to a distinct bacterial clade but have remarkably different phenotypes. T. thermophilus is a thermophile, which is relatively sensitive to ionizing radiatio...
Plastid-bearing cryptophytes like Cryptomonas contain four genomes in a cell, the nucleus, the nucleomorph, the plastid genome and the mitochondrial genome. Comparative phylogenetic analyses encompassing DNA sequ...
Comparative genomics has provided valuable insights into the nature of gene sequence variation and chromosomal organization of closely related bacterial species. However, questions about the biological signifi...
The identification of sequence innovations in the genomes of mammals facilitates understanding of human gene function, as well as sheds light on the molecular mechanisms which underlie these changes. Although ...
HIV-1 is a retrovirus with high rate of recombination. Increasing experimental studies in vitro indicated that local hairpin structure of RNA was associated with recombination by favoring RT pausing and promoting...
The advent of live-attenuated vaccines against measles virus during the 1960'ies changed the circulation dynamics of the virus. Earlier the virus was indigenous to countries worldwide, but now it is mediated b...
Alu elements are Short INterspersed Elements (SINEs) in primate genomes that have proven useful as markers for studying genome evolution, population biology and phylogenetics. Most of these applications, however,...
Probabilistic methods have progressively supplanted the Maximum Parsimony (MP) method for inferring phylogenetic trees. One of the major reasons for this shift was that MP is much more sensitive to the Long Br...
The modern wildherd of the tundra muskox (Ovibos moschatus) is native only to the New World (northern North America and Greenland), and its genetic diversity is notably low. However, like several other megafaunal...
Translation initiation in eukaryotes involves the recruitment of mRNA to the ribosome which is controlled by the translation factor eIF4E. eIF4E binds to the 5'-m7Gppp cap-structure of mRNA. Three dimensional str...
We investigated genetic variation of a major histcompatibility complex (MHC) pseudogene (Anvi-DAB1) in the little greenbul (Andropadus virens) from four localities in Cameroon and one in Ivory Coast, West Africa....
The intergenic spacer of the ribosomal genes in eukaryotes (IGS) contains duplications of the core transcription promoter. The number of these duplicated promoters, as measured by the IGS length, appears to be...
Only one spliceosomal-type intron has previously been identified in the unicellular eukaryotic parasite, Giardia lamblia (a diplomonad). This intron is only 35 nucleotides in length and is unusual in possessing a...
A number of recent papers have cast doubt on the applicability of the quasispecies concept to virus evolution, and have argued that population genetics is a more appropriate framework to describe virus evoluti...
The cytochrome P450 aromatase (CYP19), catalyses the aromatisation of androgens to estrogens, a key mechanism in vertebrate reproductive physiology. A current evolutionary hypothesis suggests that CYP19 gene aros...
Completed genomes and environmental genomic sequences are bringing a significant contribution to understanding the evolution of gene families, microbial metabolism and community eco-physiology. Here, we used c...
The G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) constitute one of the largest and most ancient superfamilies of membrane proteins. They play a central role in physiological processes affecting almost all aspects of th...
The genes for salivary androgen-binding protein (ABP) subunits have been evolving rapidly in ancestors of the house mouse Mus musculus, as evidenced both by recent and extensive gene duplication and by high ratio...
Rodent and primate pregnancy-specific glycoprotein (PSG) gene families have expanded independently from a common ancestor and are expressed virtually exclusively in placental trophoblasts. However, within each sp...
Although recent molecular phylogenetic studies have identified the photosynthetic relatives of several enigmatic holoparasitic angiosperms, uncertainty remains for the last parasitic plant order, Balanophorale...
Internal reproductive organ size is an important determinant of male reproductive success. While the response of testis length to variation in the intensity of sperm competition is well documented across many ...
The concept of a genomic core, defined as the set of genes ubiquitous in all genomes of a monophyletic group, has become crucial in comparative and evolutionary genomics. However, it is still a matter of debat...
Wolbachia are endosymbiotic bacteria that commonly infect numerous arthropods. Despite their broad taxonomic distribution, the transmission patterns of these bacteria within and among host species are not well un...
Although there are now about 200 complete bacterial genomes in GenBank, deep bacterial phylogeny remains a difficult problem, due to confounding horizontal gene transfers and other phylogenetic "noise". Previo...
Since Darwin's Origin of Species, reconstructing the Tree of Life has been a goal of evolutionists, and tree-thinking has become a major concept of evolutionary biology. Practically, building the Tree of Life ...
View featured videos from across the BMC-series journals
For BMC Evolutionary Biology (former title)
Citation Impact 2023
Journal Impact Factor: 2.3
5-year Journal Impact Factor: 2.3
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): 0.959
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): 0.887
Speed 2024
Submission to first editorial decision (median days): 10
Submission to acceptance (median days): 134
Usage 2024
Downloads: 2,754,983
Altmetric mentions: 3
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.