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A stereotyped array of body wall muscles enables precision and stereotypy of animal movements. In Drosophila, each syncytial muscle forms via fusion of one founder cell (FC) with multiple fusion competent myoblas...
One of the great revelations of post-genomic biology has been the extent to which essential functions and mechanisms are conserved across vast phylogenetic distances. Because of this, we can look to the fruit ...
Matriptase is a membrane serine protease essential for epithelial development, homeostasis, and regeneration, as well as a central orchestrator of pathogenic pericellular signaling in the context of inflammato...
Intravascular leukocyte recruitment in most vertebrate tissues is restricted to postcapillary and collecting venules, whereas capillaries and arterioles usually support little or no leukocyte adhesion. This se...
Recent developments in droplet-based microfluidics allow the transcriptional profiling of thousands of individual cells in a quantitative, highly parallel and cost-effective way. A critical, often limiting ste...
Senses connect organisms to both the world and to each other, yet there is much we don’t know about them. Using examples drawn primarily from the author’s subfield of vision research, this article discusses fi...
Improvements in imaging technology and the development of powerful machine learning algorithms are revolutionizing the study of animal behavior in the laboratory. These innovations promise to reveal both globa...
Accurate determination of mouse positions from video data is crucial for various types of behavioral analyses. While detection of body positions is straightforward, the correct identification of nose positions...
Endogenous circadian oscillators distributed across the mammalian body are synchronised among themselves and with external time via a variety of signalling molecules, some of which interact with G-protein-coup...
Plant-pathogenic oomycetes are responsible for economically important losses in crops worldwide. Phytophthora palmivora, a tropical relative of the potato late blight pathogen, causes rotting diseases in many tro...
The merging of genomes in inter-specific hybrids can result in novel phenotypes, including increased growth rate and biomass yield, a phenomenon known as heterosis. Heterosis is typically viewed as the opposit...
Biological systems integrate multiscale processes and networks and are, therefore, viewed as difficult to dissect. However, because of the clear-cut separation between the software code (the information encode...
Emerging pathogens of crops threaten food security and are increasingly problematic due to intensive agriculture and high volumes of trade and transport in plants and plant products. The ability to predict pat...
Animal olfactory systems detect volatile environmental chemicals and integrate this information to direct the discovery of food and mates as well as danger avoidance. Rather than remaining constant, olfactory ...
The misfolding of the cellular prion protein (PrPC) causes fatal neurodegenerative diseases. Yet PrPC is highly conserved in mammals, suggesting that it exerts beneficial functions preventing its evolutionary eli...
Stereotypic cleavage patterns play a crucial role in cell fate determination by precisely positioning early embryonic blastomeres. Although misplaced cell divisions can alter blastomere fates and cause embryon...
Fishes are extremely speciose and also highly disparate in their fin configurations, more specifically in the number of fins present as well as their structure, shape, and size. How they achieved this remarkab...
Trimeric intracellular cation (TRIC) channels are crucial for Ca2+ handling in eukaryotes and are involved in K+ uptake in prokaryotes. Recent studies on the representative members of eukaryotic and prokaryotic T...
Exercise exerts remarkably powerful effects on metabolism and health, with anti-disease and anti-aging outcomes. Pharmacological manipulation of exercise benefit circuits might improve the health of the sedent...
Animals exhibit astonishingly complex behaviors. Studying the subtle features of these behaviors requires quantitative, high-throughput, and accurate systems that can cope with the often rich perplexing data.
Most agronomic traits in rice are complex and polygenic. The identification of quantitative trait loci (QTL) for grain length is an important objective of rice genetic research and breeding programs.
Mitochondria of opisthokonts undergo permanent fission and fusion throughout the cell cycle. Here, we investigated the dynamics of the mitosomes, the simplest forms of mitochondria, in the anaerobic protist pa...
All of us have marveled at the remarkable diversity of animal behaviors in nature.
Contamination is a well-known but often neglected problem in molecular biology. Here, we investigated the prevalence of cross-contamination among 446 samples from 116 distinct species of animals, which were pr...
The fate of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) has been inferred indirectly from the activity of ER-localized thiol oxidases and peroxiredoxins, in vitro, and the consequences of their gen...
Salicylic acid (SA) is an important plant hormone that regulates many aspects of plant growth and development, as well as resistance to (a)biotic stress. Efforts to identify SA effector proteins have revealed ...
In addition to messenger RNA (mRNA), noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) are essential components in cellular machineries for translation and splicing. Besides their housekeeping functions, ncRNAs are involved in cell typ...
Defining the transcriptome and the genetic pathways of pancreatic cells is of great interest for elucidating the molecular attributes of pancreas disorders such as diabetes and cancer. As the function of the d...
Plants are exposed to diverse pathogens and pests, yet most plants are resistant to most plant pathogens. Non-host resistance describes the ability of all members of a plant species to successfully prevent col...
Understanding the patterns of biodiversity distribution and what influences them is a fundamental pre-requisite for effective conservation and sustainable utilisation of biodiversity. Such knowledge is increas...
The tropics are the repository of much of the world’s biodiversity, yet are undersampled relative to temperate regions. To help fill this knowledge gap, a paper in BMC Biology explores diversity patterns in tropi...
Growth/differentiation factor 8 (GDF8) and GDF11 are two highly similar members of the transforming growth factor β (TGFβ) family. While GDF8 has been recognized as a negative regulator of muscle growth and di...
Meta-analysis is a statistical procedure for analyzing the combined data from different studies, and can be a major source of concise up-to-date information. The overall conclusions of a meta-analysis, however...
The mosquito Aedes aegypti is the main vector of dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever viruses. This major disease vector is thought to have arisen when the African subspecies Ae. aegypti formosus evolved fr...
The determination and regulation of cell morphology are critical components of cell-cycle control, fitness, and development in both single-cell and multicellular organisms. Understanding how environmental fact...
Circadian clocks control cell cycle factors, and circadian disruption promotes cancer. To address whether enhancing circadian rhythmicity in tumor cells affects cell cycle progression and reduces proliferation...
Zinc is an essential metal involved in many physiological processes. Previous work has identified a set of zinc transporters involved in Drosophila dietary zinc absorption. However, zinc excretion and reabsorptio...
Cyanobacteria are important agents in global carbon and nitrogen cycling and hold great promise for biotechnological applications. Model organisms such as Synechocystis sp. and Synechococcus sp. have advanced our...
Flies have some of the most elaborate visual systems in the Insecta, often featuring large, sexually dimorphic eyes with specialized “bright zones” that may have a functional role during mate-seeking behavior....
Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and cancer stem cell (CSC) formation are key underlying causes that promote extensive metastasis, drug resistance, and tumor recurrence in highly lethal pancreatic ca...
A widespread modulation of gene expression occurs in the aging brain, but little is known as to the upstream drivers of these changes. MicroRNAs emerged as fine regulators of gene expression in many biological...
Departures from the standard genetic code in eukaryotic nuclear genomes are known for only a handful of lineages and only a few genetic code variants seem to exist outside the ciliates, the most creative group...
The prevalence of several human morbid phenotypes is sometimes much higher than intuitively expected. This can directly arise from the presence of two sexes, male and female, in one species. Men and women have...
Norepinephrine/noradrenaline is a neurotransmitter implicated in arousal and other aspects of vertebrate behavior and physiology. In invertebrates, adrenergic signaling is considered absent and analogous funct...
Aggregation of peptide hormone precursors in the trans-Golgi network is an essential process in the biogenesis of secretory granules in endocrine cells. It has recently been proposed that this aggregation corr...
Animals use sensory cues to efficiently locate resources, but when sensory information is insufficient, they may rely on internally coded search strategies. Despite the importance of search behavior, there is ...
The internal organization of cells depends on mechanisms to ensure that transport carriers, such as vesicles, fuse only with the correct destination organelle. Several types of proteins have been proposed to c...
Apicomplexan parasites employ a unique form of movement, termed gliding motility, in order to invade the host cell. This movement depends on the parasite’s actomyosin system, which is thought to generate the f...
Increasing evidence suggests that influenza reassortment not only contributes to the emergence of new human pandemics but also plays an important role in seasonal influenza epidemics, disease severity, evoluti...
Western blotting is among the most common techniques used in molecular biology and a simple way of assessing the presence or absence of a protein. It is also commonly used to compare protein levels in differen...
2022 Citation Impact
5.4 - 2-year Impact Factor
7.1 - 5-year Impact Factor
1.461 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
2.324 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)
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10 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
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