Page 97 of 98
The clear dominance of two-gender sex in recent species is a notorious puzzle of evolutionary theory. It has at least two layers: besides the most fundamental and challenging question why sex exists at all, th...
Modern-day proteins were selected during long evolutionary history as descendants of ancient life forms. In silico reconstruction of such ancestral protein sequences facilitates our understanding of evolutionary ...
The size distribution of gene families in a broad range of genomes is well approximated by a generalized Pareto function. Evolution of ensembles of gene families can be described with Birth, Death, and Innovat...
While the pathogenesis and epidemiology of tuberculosis are well studied, relatively little is known about the evolution of the infectious agent Mycobacterium tuberculosis, especially at the within-host level. Th...
Evolutionary theory suggests that the selection pressure on parasites to maximize their transmission determines their optimal host exploitation strategies and thus their virulence. Establishing the adaptive ba...
DNA repair genes encode proteins that protect organisms against genetic damage generated by environmental agents and by-products of cell metabolism. The importance of these genes in life maintenance is support...
Order Charadriiformes (shorebirds) is an ideal model group in which to study a wide range of behavioural, ecological and macroevolutionary processes across species. However, comparative studies depend on phylo...
The Campanulaceae (the "hare bell" or "bellflower" family) is a derived angiosperm family comprised of about 600 species treated in 35 to 55 genera. Taxonomic treatments vary widely and little phylogenetic wor...
In eukaryotes, RNA polymerase III (RNAP III) transcribes the genes for small RNAs like tRNAs, 5S rRNA, and several viral RNAs, and short interspersed repetitive elements (SINEs). The genes for these RNAs and S...
With some exceptions, mitochondria within the class Insecta have the same gene content, and generally, a similar gene order allowing the proposal of an ancestral gene order. The principal exceptions are severa...
Aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) enzymes catalyze the synthesis of biogenic amines, including the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine, throughout the animal kingdom. These neurotransmitters typi...
The typical antbirds (Thamnophilidae) form a monophyletic and diverse family of suboscine passerines that inhabit neotropical forests. However, the phylogenetic relationships within this assemblage are poorly ...
Gene duplication is an important mechanism that can lead to the emergence of new functions during evolution. The impact of duplication on the mode of gene evolution has been the subject of several theoretical ...
The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) caused a severe global epidemic in 2003 which led to hundreds of deaths and many thousands of hospitalizations. The virus causing SARS was identified as...
In phylogenetic analysis we face the problem that several subclade topologies are known or easily inferred and well supported by bootstrap analysis, but basal branching patterns cannot be unambiguously estimat...
Codon usage bias has been widely reported to correlate with GC composition. However, the quantitative relationship between codon usage bias and GC composition across species has not been reported.
Most analysis programs for inferring molecular phylogenies are difficult to use, in particular for researchers with little programming experience.
The Retraction Note to this article has been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology 2015 15:243
Mitochondrial DNA has been detected in the nuclear genome of eukaryotes as pseudogenes, or Numts. Human and plant genomes harbor a large number of Numts, some of which have high similarity to mitochondrial fragme...
Examination of ancient gene families can provide an insight into how the evolution of gene structure can relate to function. Functional homologs of the evolutionarily conserved transforming acidic coiled coil (TA...
The North American Agalinis are representatives of a taxonomically difficult group that has been subject to extensive taxonomic revision from species level through higher sub-generic designations (e.g., subsectio...
A response to Fraser HB, Hirsh AE: Evolutionary rate depends on number of protein-protein interactions independently of gene expression level. BMC Evol Biol 2004, 4: 13
Whether or not a protein's number of physical interactions with other proteins plays a role in determining its rate of evolution has been a contentious issue. A recent analysis suggested that the observed corr...
Anopheles (Nyssorhynchus) albitarsis (Diptera: Culicidae) is one of the very few South American mosquito vectors of malaria successfully colonized in the laboratory. These vectors are ...
Comparative genomic data among organisms allow the reconstruction of their phylogenies and evolutionary time scales. Molecular timings have been recently used to suggest that environmental global change have s...
Plant natriuretic peptides (PNPs) are systemically mobile molecules that regulate homeostasis at nanomolar concentrations. PNPs are up-regulated under conditions of osmotic stress and PNP-dependent processes i...
Gene duplication followed by the functional divergence of the resulting pair of paralogous proteins is a major force shaping molecular networks in living organisms. Recent species-wide data for protein-protein...
Social wasps in the subfamily Polistinae (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) have been important in studies of the evolution of sociality, kin selection, and within colony conflicts of interest. These studies have general...
Iron-sulfur (FeS) proteins are present in all living organisms and play important roles in electron transport and metalloenzyme catalysis. The maturation of FeS proteins in eukaryotes is an essential function ...
Inferences about protein function are often made based on sequence homology to other gene products of known activities. This approach is valuable for small families of conserved proteins but can be difficult t...
Insecticide resistance is now common in insects due to the frequent use of chemicals to control them, which provides a useful tool to study the adaptation of eukaryotic genome to new environments. Although num...
Organophosphate and carbamate insecticides irreversibly inhibit acetylcholinesterase causing death of insects. Resistance-modified acetylcholinesterases(AChEs) have been described in many insect species and se...
Vertebrate genes often appear to cluster within the background of nontranscribed genomic DNA. Here an analysis of the physical distribution of gene structures on human chromosome 7 was performed to confirm the...
The pattern and timing of the rise in complex multicellular life during Earth's history has not been established. Great disparity persists between the pattern suggested by the fossil record and that estimated ...
Theoretical studies suggest that direct and indirect selection have the potential to cause substantial evolutionary change in female mate choice. Similarly, sexual selection is considered a strong force in the...
Understanding the diversity of interactions between RNA aptamers and nucleotide cofactors promises both to facilitate the design of new RNA enzymes that utilize these cofactors and to constrain models of RNA W...
Many studies in evolutionary biology and genetics are limited by the rate at which phenotypic information can be acquired. The wings of Drosophila species are a favorable target for automated analysis because ...
The widespread introduction of amino acid substitutions into organismal proteomes has occurred during natural evolution, but has been difficult to achieve by directed evolution. The adaptation of the translati...
Models of the maintenance of sex predict that one reproductive strategy, sexual or parthenogenetic, should outcompete the other. Distribution patterns may reflect the outcome of this competition as well as the...
Analytical methods have been proposed to determine whether there are evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) for a trait of ecological significance, or whether there is disruptive selection in a population appr...
Several studies have suggested that proteins that interact with more partners evolve more slowly. The strength and validity of this association has been called into question. Here we investigate how biases in ...
Drosophila nasuta nasuta (2n = 8) and Drosophila nasuta albomicans (2n = 6) are a pair of sibling allopatric chromosomal cross-fertile races of the nasuta subgroup of immigrans species...
The binding sites of sequence specific transcription factors are an important and relatively well-understood class of functional non-coding DNAs. Although a wide variety of experimental and computational metho...
The ars gene system provides arsenic resistance for a variety of microorganisms and can be chromosomal or plasmid-borne. The arsC gene, which codes for an arsenate reductase is essential for arsenate resistance a...
Dof proteins are a family of plant-specific transcription factors that contain a particular class of zinc-finger DNA-binding domain. Members of this family have been found to play diverse roles in gene regulat...
Phylogenetic hypotheses of higher-level relationships in the order Charadriiformes based on morphological data, partly disagree with those based on DNA-DNA hybridisation data. So far, these relationships have ...
Genomic imprinting refers to the differential expression of genes inherited from the mother and father (matrigenes and patrigenes). The kinship theory of genomic imprinting treats parent-specific gene expressi...
Lateral gene transfer can introduce genes with novel functions into genomes or replace genes with functionally similar orthologs or paralogs. Here we present a study of the occurrence of the latter gene replac...
Many groups of land snails show great interspecific diversity in shell ornamentation, which may include spines on the shell and flanges on the aperture. Such structures have been explained as camouflage or def...
A key event in the origin of life on this planet has been formation of self-replicating RNA-type molecules, which were complex enough to undergo a Darwinian-type evolution (origin of the "RNA world"). However,...
It has been shown for an evolutionarily distant genomic comparison that the number of protein-protein interactions a protein has correlates negatively with their rates of evolution. However, the generality of ...
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.