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Understanding the role of seascape in shaping genetic and demographic population structure is highly challenging for marine pelagic species such as cetaceans for which there is generally little evidence of wha...
An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functio...
All previously reported eukaryotic nuclear genome sequences have been incomplete, especially in highly repeated units and chromosomal ends. Because repetitive DNA is important for many aspects of biology, comp...
This article has been published as a correction for an error in the manuscript of Pavlov et al BMC Biology 2004, 2:11.
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2004 2:11
Horizontal or lateral transfer of genetic material between distantly related prokaryotes has been shown to play a major role in the evolution of bacterial and archaeal genomes, but exchange of genes between pr...
Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are an emerging focus for both computational analysis and experimental research, resulting in a growing number of novel, non-protein coding transcripts with often unknown functions. Wh...
The rapid and accurate identification of species is a critical component of large-scale biodiversity monitoring programs. DNA arrays (micro and macro) and DNA barcodes are two molecular approaches that have re...
Organisms are capable of developing different phenotypes by altering the genes they express. This phenotypic plasticity provides a means for species to respond effectively to environmental conditions. One of t...
Histone H1 is involved in the formation and maintenance of chromatin higher order structure. H1 has multiple isoforms; the subtypes differ in timing of expression, extent of phosphorylation and turnover rate. ...
The claim that differences in brain size across primate species has mainly been driven by the demands of sociality (the "social brain" hypothesis) is now widely accepted. Some of the evidence to support this c...
Social and competitive demands often differ between the sexes in mammals. These differing demands should be expected to produce variation in the relative sizes of various brain structures. Sexual selection on ...
A polymorphism in the activating component of the nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) oxidase complex, neutrophil cytosolic factor 1 (NCF1), has previously been identified as a regulator of art...
Information processing in the brain requires large amounts of metabolic energy, the spatial distribution of which is highly heterogeneous, reflecting the complex activity patterns in the mammalian brain.
Predicting 3-dimensional protein structures from amino-acid sequences is an important unsolved problem in computational structural biology. The problem becomes relatively easier if close homologous proteins ha...
Cues predictive of food availability are powerful modulators of appetite as well as food-seeking and ingestive behaviors. The neurobiological underpinnings of these conditioned responses are not well understoo...
The pygopus gene of Drosophila encodes an essential component of the Armadillo (β-catenin) transcription factor complex of canonical Wnt signaling. To better understand the functions of Pygopus-mediated canonical...
Bacterial motility is a crucial factor in the colonization of natural environments. Escherichia coli has two flagella-driven motility types: swimming and swarming. Swimming motility consists of individual cell mo...
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2006 4:34
Balancing selection operating for long evolutionary periods at a locus is characterized by the maintenance of distinct alleles because of a heterozygote or rare-allele advantage. The loci under balancing selec...
Reduction or elimination of vector populations will tend to reduce or eliminate transmission of vector-borne diseases. One potential method for environmentally-friendly, species-specific population control is ...
The Ras-related GTPase, Rheb, regulates the growth of animal cells. Genetic and biochemical tests place Rheb upstream of the target of rapamycin (TOR) protein kinase, and downstream of the tuberous sclerosis c...
Inherited bacteria that kill male offspring, male-killers, are known to be common in insects, but little is understood about the mechanisms used by male-killing bacteria to kill males. In this paper we describ...
The apparent rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis in Arkansas, USA, previously feared extinct, was supported by video evidence of a single bird in flight (Fitzpatrick et al, Science ...
The parasitic sucking lice of primates are known to have undergone at least 25 million years of coevolution with their hosts. For example, chimpanzee lice and human head/body lice last shared a common ancestor...
Despite advances in imaging techniques, real-time visualization of the structure and dynamics of tissues and organs inside small living animals has remained elusive. Recently, we have been using synchrotron x-...
Guenons (tribe Cercopithecini) are a species-rich group of primates that have attracted considerable attention from both primatologists and evolutionary biologists. The complex speciation pattern has made the ...
Transcription of large numbers of non-coding RNAs originating from intronic regions of human genes has been recently reported, but mechanisms governing their biosynthesis and biological functions are largely u...
Insects that feed on plants contribute greatly to the generation of biodiversity. Hypotheses explaining rate increases in phytophagous insect diversification and mechanisms driving speciation in such specialis...
The Viridiplantae comprise two major phyla: the Streptophyta, containing the charophycean green algae and all land plants, and the Chlorophyta, containing the remaining green algae. Despite recent progress in ...
Embryos of taxonomically different vertebrates are thought to pass through a stage in which they resemble one another morphologically. This "vertebrate phylotypic stage" may represent the basic vertebrate body...
TBLASTN is a mode of operation for BLAST that aligns protein sequences to a nucleotide database translated in all six frames. We present the first description of the modern implementation of TBLASTN, focusing ...
Instructions to fabricate mineralized structures with distinct nanoscale architectures, such as seashells and coral and vertebrate skeletons, are encoded in the genomes of a wide variety of animals. In mollusk...
Present protein interaction network data sets include only interactions among subsets of the proteins in an organism. Previously this has been ignored, but in principle any global network analysis that only lo...
Inteins are self-splicing protein elements. They are translated as inserts within host proteins that excise themselves and ligate the flanking portions of the host protein (exteins) with a peptide bond. They a...
Several lines of evidence suggest that codon usage in the Drosophila saltans and D. willistoni lineages has shifted towards a less frequent use of GC-ending codons. Introns in these lineages show a parallel shift...
Granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) is known as a powerful regulator of white blood cell proliferation and differentiation in mammals. We, and others, have shown that G-CSF is effective in treating c...
Fertilization restores the diploid state and begins the process by which the single-cell oocyte is converted into a polarized, multicellular organism. In the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, two of the earliest ...
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplotypes have become popular tools for tracing maternal ancestry, and several companies offer this service to the general public. Numerous studies have demonstrated that human mtDNA...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2007 5:13
Coding variants of the prion protein gene (PRNP) have been shown to be major determinants for the susceptibility to transmitted prion diseases in humans, mice and sheep. However, to date, the effects of polymorph...
While traditional models of Alzheimer's disease focused on large fibrillar deposits of the Aβ42 amyloid peptide in the brain, recent work suggests that the major pathogenic effects may be attributed to SDS-stable...
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) to the plant mitochondrial genome has recently been shown to occur at a surprisingly high rate; however, little evidence has been found for HGT to the plastid genome, despite ext...
Mean phosphorous:nitrogen (P:N) ratios and relationships of P:N ratios with the growth rate of organisms indicate a surprising similarity among and within microbial species, plants, and insect herbivores. To r...
Protein translocation to the proper cellular destination may be guided by various classes of sorting signals recognizable in the primary sequence. Detection in some genomes, but not others, may reveal sorting ...
Human embryonic stem cells (hESC) offer a renewable source of a wide range of cell types for use in research and cell-based therapies to treat disease. Inspection of protein markers provides important informat...
Congenital aniridia caused by heterozygousity at the PAX6 locus is associated with ocular surface disease including keratopathy. It is not clear whether the keratopathy is a direct result of reduced PAX6 gene dos...
The Caenorhabditis elegans male exhibits a stereotypic behavioral pattern when attempting to mate. This behavior has been divided into the following steps: response, backing, turning, vulva location, spicule inse...
A combination of magnetoencephalography and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy was used to correlate the electrophysiology of rapid auditory processing and the neurochemistry of the auditory cortex in 15 h...
Histone deacetylases are enzymes that modify core histones and play key roles in transcriptional regulation, chromatin assembly, DNA repair, and recombination in eukaryotes. Three types of related histone deac...
The present study aimed to investigate the time course of electrocortical facilitation for affectively arousing written words during the so-called 'attentional blink' (AB) period in a rapid serial visual prese...
G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) play a crucial role in many biological processes and represent a major class of drug targets. However, purification of GPCRs for biochemical study is difficult and current m...
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