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Male sexually selected vocalisations generally contain both individuality and quality cues that are crucial in intra- as well as inter-sexual communication. As individuality is a fixed feature whereas male phe...
One of the four principal categories of cell-cell junctions that hold together and shape distinct tissues and organs in vertebrates, adherens junctions (AJs) form cell-cell contacts that connect transmembrane ...
Neoplastic overgrowth depends on the cooperation of several mutations ultimately leading to major rearrangements in cellular behaviour. Precancerous cells are often removed by cell death from normal tissues in...
Tiny marine animals that complete their life cycle in the total absence of light and oxygen are reported by Roberto Danovaro and colleagues in this issue of BMC Biology. These fascinating animals are new members ...
The sediments of a deep-sea hypersaline and sulfidic Mediterranean basin have yielded an unexpected discovery, the first multicellular animals living entirely without oxygen. Reported by Danovaro et al. in BMC Bi...
Several unicellular organisms (prokaryotes and protozoa) can live under permanently anoxic conditions. Although a few metazoans can survive temporarily in the absence of oxygen, it is believed that multi-cellu...
Due to its high polymorphism and importance for disease resistance, the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) has been an important focus of many vertebrate genome projects. Avian MHC organization is of parti...
Among songbirds, the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) is an excellent model system for investigating the neural mechanisms underlying complex behaviours such as vocal communication, learning and social interacti...
Self-complementary RNA transcripts form a double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) that triggers a sequence-specific mRNA degradation, in a process known as RNA interference (RNAi), leading to gene silencing. In vascular p...
Speculation regarding the importance of changes in gene regulation in determining major phylogenetic patterns continues to accrue, despite a lack of broad-scale comparative studies examining how patterns of ge...
Sexual selection theory predicts that females, being the limiting sex, invest less in courtship signals than males. However, when chemical signals are involved it is often the female that initiates mating by p...
Microbial denitrification is not considered important in human-associated microbial communities. Accordingly, metabolic investigations of the microbial biofilm communities of human dental plaque have focused o...
The ankyrin repeat and suppressor of cytokine signalling (SOCS) box proteins (Asbs) are a large protein family implicated in diverse biological processes including regulation of proliferation and differentiati...
Large-scale intervention programmes to control or eliminate several infectious diseases are currently underway worldwide. However, a major unresolved question remains: what are reasonable stopping points for t...
Replicators are the crucial entities in evolution. The notion of a replicator, however, is far less exact than the weight of its importance. Without identifying and classifying multiplying entities exactly, th...
The increased battery of molecular markers, derived from comparative genomics, is aiding our understanding of the genetics of domestication. The recent BMC Biology article pertaining to the evolution of small siz...
Among the greatest challenges for biology in the 21st century is inference of the tree of life. Interest in, and progress toward, this goal has increased dramatically with the growing availability of molecular...
Technological advances have enabled the accurate quantification of gene expression, even within single cell types. While transcriptome analyses are routinely performed, most experimental designs only provide s...
The Dlc1 (deleted in liver cancer 1) tumour suppressor gene codes for a RhoGTPase activating protein that is found inactivated in many tumour types. Several transcriptional isoforms have been described but the...
A selective sweep containing the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) gene is associated with size variation in domestic dogs. Intron 2 of IGF1 contains a SINE element and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) foun...
The Tarim Basin, located on the ancient Silk Road, played a very important role in the history of human migration and cultural communications between the West and the East. However, both the exact period at wh...
Many Caenorhabditis elegans mutations increase longevity and much evidence suggests that they do so at least partly via changes in metabolism. However, up until now there has been no systematic investigation of h...
Lignification of the fruit endocarp layer occurs in many angiosperms and plays a critical role in seed protection and dispersal. This process has been extensively studied with relationship to pod shatter or de...
Most rapidly evolving gene families are involved in immune responses and reproduction, two biological functions which have been assigned to the carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) gene family. To gain insights into...
Endothelial cell-cell junctions maintain endothelial integrity and regulate vascular morphogenesis and homeostasis. Cell-cell junctions are usually depicted with a linear morphology along the boundaries betwee...
Surveys of ontogenetic development of hearing and sound production in fish are scarce, and the ontogenetic development of acoustic communication has been investigated in only two fish species so far. Studies o...
Brain size is a key adaptive trait. It is often assumed that increasing brain size was a general evolutionary trend in primates, yet recent fossil discoveries have documented brain size decreases in some linea...
While bilaterality is a defining characteristic of triploblastic animals, several assemblages have managed to break this symmetry in order to exploit the adaptive peaks garnered through the lateralization of b...
Previous studies have linked neurotrophin receptor-interacting MAGE protein to the bone morphogenic protein signaling pathway and its effect on p38 mediated apoptosis of neural progenitor cells via the XIAP-Ta...
Folate (vitamin B9) is essential for cellular proliferation as it is involved in the biosynthesis of deoxythymidine monophosphate (dTMP) and s-adenosylmethionine (AdoMet). The link between folate depletion and...
Dedifferentiation occurs naturally in mature cell types during epimorphic regeneration in fish and some amphibians. Dedifferentiation also occurs in the induction of pluripotent stem cells when a set of transc...
LIM homeobox (Lhx) transcription factors are unique to the animal lineage and have patterning roles during embryonic development in flies, nematodes and vertebrates, with a conserved role in specifying neurona...
Giant lobeliads on tropical mountains in East Africa and Hawaii have highly unusual, giant-rosette growth forms that appear to be convergent on each other and on those of several independently evolved groups o...
Genomes of several yeast species contain integrated DNA copies of complete genomes or individual genes of non-retroviral double-strand RNA viruses as reported in a recent BMC Biology article by Taylor and Bruenn....
The transcription/export complex is evolutionarily conserved from yeast to man and is required for coupled transcription elongation and nuclear export of mRNAs. FMIP(Fms interacting protein) is a member of the...
Endogenous derivatives of non-retroviral RNA viruses are thought to be absent or rare in eukaryotic genomes because integration of RNA viruses in host genomes is impossible without reverse transcription. Howev...
Obesity is a chronic low inflammatory state. In the obesity condition the white adipose tissue (WAT) is massively infiltrated with monocytes/macrophages, and the nature of the signals recruiting these inflamma...
Within chromatin, the histone variant H2A.Z plays a role in many diverse nuclear processes including transcription, preventing the spread of heterochromatin and epigenetic transcriptional memory. The molecular...
The dystrophin glycoprotein complex is disrupted in Duchenne muscular dystrophy and many other neuromuscular diseases. The principal heterodimeric partner of dystrophin at the heart of the dystrophin glycoprot...
Molecular evolutionary studies share the common goal of elucidating historical relationships, and the common challenge of adequately sampling taxa and characters. Particularly at low taxonomic levels, recent d...
Following amputation, urodele salamander limbs reprogram somatic cells to form a blastema that self-organizes into the missing limb parts to restore the structure and function of the limb. To help understand t...
The tendency of animals and plants to independently develop similar features under similar evolutionary pressures - convergence - is a widespread phenomenon in nature. In plants, convergence has been suggested...
Bacteria-triggered signaling events in infected host cells are key elements in shaping the host response to pathogens. Within the eukaryotic cell, signaling complexes are spatially organized. However, the inve...
Subjective tinnitus is the perception of a sound in the absence of any physical source. It has been shown that tinnitus is associated with hyperactivity of the auditory cortices. Accompanying this hyperactivit...
Early microbial colonization of the gut reduces the incidence of infectious, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Recent population studies reveal that childhood hygiene is a significant risk factor for devel...
Phylogeographic reconstruction of some bacterial populations is hindered by low diversity coupled with high levels of lateral gene transfer. A comparison of recombination levels and diversity at seven housekee...
Basoapical polarity in epithelia is critical for proper tissue function, and control of proliferation and survival. Cell culture models that recapitulate epithelial tissue architecture are invaluable to unrave...
The signal recognition particle (SRP) receptor plays a vital role in co-translational protein targeting, because it connects the soluble SRP-ribosome-nascent chain complex (SRP-RNCs) to the membrane bound Sec ...
Ubiquitin regulates a myriad of important cellular processes through covalent attachment to its substrates. A classic role for ubiquitin is to flag proteins for destruction by the proteasome. Recent studies in...
Bone-eating Osedax worms have proved to be surprisingly diverse and widespread. Including the initial description of this genus in 2004, five species that live at depths between 25 and 3,000 m in the eastern and ...
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