Page 96 of 98
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 ...
We have examined the evolution of the genes at the major human β-defensin locus and the orthologous loci in a range of other primates and mouse. For the first time these data allow us to examine selective epis...
Integrins are a functionally significant family of metazoan cell surface adhesion receptors. The receptors are dimers composed of an alpha and a beta chain. Vertebrate genomes encode an expanded set of integri...
The chromosomes of higher plants are littered with retrotransposons that, in many cases, constitute as much as 80% of plant genomes. Long terminal repeat retrotransposons have been especially successful coloni...
To help conservation programs of the endangered spur-thighed tortoise and to gain better insight into its systematics, genetic variation and evolution in the tortoise species Testudo graeca (Testudines: Testudini...
Gene duplication has been suggested to be an important process in the generation of evolutionary novelty. Neofunctionalization, as an adaptive process where one copy mutates into a function that was not presen...
When organismal phylogenies based on sequences of single marker genes are poorly resolved, a logical approach is to add more markers, on the assumption that weak but congruent phylogenetic signal will be reinf...
Analysis of human complete mitochondrial DNA sequences has largely contributed to resolve phylogenies and antiquity of different lineages belonging to the majorhaplogroups L, N and M (East-Asian lineages). In ...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2006 6:9
Evolutionary conflicts of interest between the sexes often lead to co-evolutionary arms races consisting of repeated arisal of traits advantageous for one sex but harmful to the other sex, and counter-adaptati...
The modeling of complex systems, as disparate as the World Wide Web and the cellular metabolism, as networks has recently uncovered a set of generic organizing principles: Most of these systems are scale-free ...
Protein interaction networks aim to summarize the complex interplay of proteins in an organism. Early studies suggested that the position of a protein in the network determines its evolutionary rate but there ...
Blocks of duplicated genomic DNA sequence longer than 1000 base pairs are known as low copy repeats (LCRs). Identified by their sequence similarity, LCRs are abundant in the human genome, and are interesting b...
The f factor is a new parameter for accommodating the influence of both the starting and ending states in the rate matrices of "generalized weighted frequencies" (+gwF) models for sequence evolution. In this stud...
Of the major families of long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons, the Pao/BEL family is probably the least well studied. It is becoming apparent that numerous LTR retrotransposons and other mobile genetic ele...
Yellowfin and skipjack tuna are globally distributed in the world's tropical and sub-tropical oceans. Since little, if any, migration of these fishes occurs between the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific Oceans, one mi...
Alu elements are short (~300 bp) interspersed elements that amplify in primate genomes through a process termed retroposition. The expansion of these elements has had a significant imp...
The adaptive radiations of cichlid fishes in East Africa are well known for their spectacular diversity and their astonishingly fast rates of speciation. About 80% of all 2,500 cichlid species in East Africa, ...
The analysis of synonymous and nonsynonymous rates of DNA change can help in the choice among competing explanations for rate variation, such as differences in constraint, mutation rate, or the strength of gen...
Mammalian ribosomes contain 79 different proteins encoded by widely scattered single copy genes. Coordinate expression of these genes at transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels is required to ensure a ...
The relaxin-like peptide family belongs in the insulin superfamily and consists of 7 peptides of high structural but low sequence similarity; relaxin-1, 2 and 3, and the insulin-like (INSL) peptides, INSL3, IN...
In yeast, birds and mammals, the SAPK-interacting protein 1 (Sin1) gene product has been implicated as a component of the stress-activated protein kinase (SAPK) signal transduction pathway. Recently, Sin1 has ...
Birds have smaller average genome sizes than other tetrapod classes, and it has been proposed that a relatively low frequency of repeating DNA is one factor in reduction of avian genome sizes.
The ADAMTS (A Disintegrin-like and Metalloprotease with Thrombospondin motifs) proteins are a family of metalloproteases with sequence similarity to the ADAM proteases, that contain the thrombospondin type 1 s...
Protein evolution and protein classification are usually inferred by comparing protein cores in their conserved aligned parts. Structurally aligned protein regions are separated by less conserved loop regions,...
The error threshold puts a limit on the amount of information maintainable in Darwinian evolution. The error threshold was first formulated in terms of genotypes. However, if a genotype-phenotype map involves ...
Bayesian phylogenetic inference holds promise as an alternative to maximum likelihood, particularly for large molecular-sequence data sets. We have investigated the performance of Bayesian inference with empir...
Many properties of organisms show great robustness against genetic and environmental perturbations. The terms canalization and developmental stability were originally proposed to describe the ability of an org...
Coalescent theory is a general framework to model genetic variation in a population. Specifically, it allows inference about population parameters from sampled DNA sequences. However, most currently employed v...
In this report we re-examine some recent experiments with digital organisms to test some predictions of quasispecies theory. These experiments revealed that under high mutation rates populations of less fit or...
Studied since the early 1940's, chromosomal polymorphisms in the deciduous woods species Drosophila robusta have been characterized by well-defined latitudinal, longitudinal, and elevational clines, but – until a...
How does intraspecific variation relate to macroevolutionary change in morphology? This question can be addressed in species in which derived characters are present but not fixed. In rhabditid nematodes, the a...
We compared two methods of rooting a phylogenetic tree: the stationary and the nonstationary substitution processes. These methods do not require an outgroup.
WRKY proteins are newly identified transcription factors involved in many plant processes including plant responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. To date, genes encoding WRKY proteins have been identified on...
Selfish genetic elements that distort the sex ratio are found widely. Notwithstanding the number of records of sex ratio distorters, their incidence is poorly understood. Two factors can prevent a sex ratio di...
The structure of molecular networks derives from dynamical processes on evolutionary time scales. For protein interaction networks, global statistical features of their structure can now be inferred consistent...
The phylogenetic position and evolutionary relationships of Fusobacteria remain uncertain. Especially intriguing is their relatedness to low G+C Gram positive bacteria (Firmicutes) by ribosomal molecular phylo...
Co-evolutionary arms races between parasites and hosts are considered to be of immense importance in the evolution of living organisms, potentially leading to highly dynamic life-history changes. The outcome o...
Female mate choice may be adaptive when males exhibit heritable genetic variation at loci encoding resistance to infectious disease. The Hamilton-Zuk hypothesis predicts that females should assess the genetic ...
In eukaryotes, PPP (p rotein p hosphatase P) family is one of the two known protein phosphatase families specific for Ser and Thr. The role of PPP phosphatases in multiple signaling pathways in eukaryotic cell ha...
Intra-specific and intra-individual polymorphism is frequently observed in nuclear markers of Ilex (Aquifoliaceae) and discrepancy between plastid and nuclear phylogenies is the rule in this genus. These observat...
Parasite heterogeneity and within-host competition are thought to be important factors influencing the dynamics of host-parasite relationships. Yet, while there have been many theoretical investigations of how...
The timescale of prokaryote evolution has been difficult to reconstruct because of a limited fossil record and complexities associated with molecular clocks and deep divergences. However, the relatively large ...
The runt domain transcription factors are key regulators of developmental processes in bilaterians, involved both in cell proliferation and differentiation, and their disruption usually leads to disease. Three...
The regulation of a gene depends on the binding of transcription factors to specific sites located in the regulatory region of the gene. The generation of these binding sites and of cooperativity between them ...
Structure conservation constrains evolutionary sequence divergence, resulting in observable sequence patterns. Most current models of protein evolution do not take structure into account explicitly, being unsu...
The phylogenetic relationships among the holoparasites of Rafflesiales have remained enigmatic for over a century. Recent molecular phylogenetic studies using the mitochondrial matR gene placed Rafflesia, Rhizant...
As key regulators of mitotic chromosome segregation, the Aurora family of serine/threonine kinases play an important role in cell division. Abnormalities in Aurora kinases have been strongly linked with cancer...
Endogenous retrovirus-like elements (ERV-Ls, primed with tRNA leucine) are a diverse group of reiterated sequences related to foamy viruses and widely distributed among mammals. As shown in previous investigation...
The primate-specific Alu elements, which originated 65 million years ago, exist in over a million copies in the human genome. These elements have been involved in genome shuffling and various diseases not only...
Quorum sensing is a process of bacterial cell-to-cell communication involving the production and detection of extracellular signaling molecules called autoinducers. Recently, it has been proposed that autoindu...
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.