Page 52 of 55
The transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), otherwise known as the prion diseases, occur following the conversion of the normal cellular prion protein (PrPC) to an alternatively folded isoform (PrPSc). ...
The amphipod crustacean Palmorchestia hypogaea occurs only in La Palma (Canary Islands) and is one of the few terrestrial amphipods in the world that have adapted to a strictly troglobitic life in volcanic cave h...
Determining an absolute timescale for avian evolutionary history has proven contentious. The two sources of information available, paleontological data and inference from extant molecular genetic sequences (co...
The heat shock protein Hsp70 promotes inducible thermotolerance in nearly every organism examined to date. Hsp70 interacts with a network of other stress-response proteins, and dissecting the relative roles of...
Tinnitus is an auditory phantom phenomenon characterized by the sensation of sounds without objectively identifiable sound sources. To date, its causes are not well understood. Previous research found altered ...
Left hemispheric dominance of language processing and handedness, previously thought to be unique to humans, is currently under debate. To gain an insight into the origin of lateralization in primates, we have...
To study the organization and interaction with the fusion domain (or fusion peptide, FP) of the transmembrane domain (TMD) of influenza virus envelope glycoprotein for its role in membrane fusion which is also...
O-fucosyltransferase1 (OFUT1) is a conserved ER protein essential for Notch signaling. OFUT1 glycosylates EGF domains, which can then be further modified by the N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase Fringe. OFUT1 also...
A central question in the evolutionary diversification of large, widespread, mobile mammals is how substantial differentiation can arise, particularly in the absence of topographic or habitat barriers to dispe...
Insects helped pioneer, and persist as model organisms for, the study of specific aspects of immunity. Although they lack an adaptive immune system, insects possess an innate immune system that recognizes and ...
The genus Cuscuta L. (Convolvulaceae), commonly known as dodders, are epiphytic vines that invade the stems of their host with haustorial feeding structures at the points of contact. Although they lack expanded l...
The urine of freshwater fish species investigated so far acts as a vehicle for reproductive pheromones affecting the behaviour and physiology of the opposite sex. However, the role of urinary pheromones in int...
Cell shape changes during cytokinesis and chemotaxis require regulation of the actin cytoskeletal network. Dynacortin, an actin cross-linking protein, localizes to the cell cortex and contributes to cortical r...
In daily life, we are exposed to different sound inputs simultaneously. During neural encoding in the auditory pathway, neural activities elicited by these different sounds interact with each other. In the pre...
The exceptionally diverse species flocks of cichlid fishes in East Africa are prime examples of parallel adaptive radiations. About 80% of East Africa's more than 1 800 endemic cichlid species, and all species...
The genetic architecture of a quantitative trait influences the phenotypic response to natural or artificial selection. One of the main objectives of genetic mapping studies is to identify the genetic factors ...
Plants, plant-feeding insects, and insect parasitoids form some of the most complex and species-rich food webs. According to the classic escape-and-radiate (EAR) hypothesis, these hyperdiverse communities resu...
Carpenter ants (genus Camponotus) are considered to be omnivores. Nonetheless, the genome sequence of Blochmannia floridanus, the obligate intracellular endosymbiont of Camponotus floridanus, suggests a function ...
The homeobox genes are a large and diverse group of genes, many of which play important roles in the embryonic development of animals. Increasingly, homeobox genes are being compared between genomes in an atte...
Direct visualization of data sets in the context of biochemical network drawings is one of the most appealing approaches in the field of data evaluation within systems biology. One important type of informatio...
Crustaceans represent an attractive model to study biomineralization and cuticle matrix formation, as these events are precisely timed to occur at certain stages of the moult cycle. Moulting, the process by wh...
Molecular interaction Information is a key resource in modern biomedical research. Publicly available data have previously been provided in a broad array of diverse formats, making access to this very difficul...
Conservation of the spatial binding organizations at the level of physico-chemical interactions is important for the formation and stability of protein-protein complexes as well as protein and drug design. Due...
Shaker codes for a Drosophila voltage-dependent potassium channel. Flies carrying Shaker null or hypomorphic mutations sleep 3–4 h/day instead of 8–14 h/day as their wild-type siblings do. Shaker-like channels a...
Dinoflagellates comprise an ecologically significant and diverse eukaryotic phylum that is sister to the phylum containing apicomplexan endoparasites. The mitochondrial genome of apicomplexans is uniquely redu...
The contrasting dose of sex chromosomes in males and females potentially introduces a large-scale imbalance in levels of gene expression between sexes, and between sex chromosomes and autosomes. In many organi...
Wolbachia are obligate endosymbiotic bacteria maternally transmitted through the egg cytoplasm that are responsible for several reproductive disorders in their insect hosts, such as cytoplasmic incompatibility (...
Histone modifications have been implicated in the regulation of transcription and, more recently, in DNA replication and repair. In yeast, a major conserved histone acetyltransferase, Hat1p, preferentially ace...
The parvulin-type peptidyl prolyl cis/trans isomerase Par14 is highly conserved in all metazoans. The recently identified parvulin Par17 contains an additional N-terminal domain whose occurrence and function was ...
In mouse the cytokine interleukin-7 (IL-7) is required for generation of B lymphocytes, but human IL-7 does not appear to have this function. A bioinformatics approach was therefore used to identify IL-7 recep...
Various typing methods have been developed for Neisseria gonorrhoeae, but none provide the combination of discrimination, reproducibility, portability, and genetic inference that allows the analysis of all aspect...
Over the last two decades, zebrafish have been established as a genetically versatile model system for investigating many different aspects of vertebrate developmental biology. With the credentials of zebrafis...
Impairment of cilia and flagella function underlies a growing number of human genetic diseases. Mutations in hydin in hy3 mice cause lethal communicating hydrocephalus with early onset. Hydin was recently identif...
Upstream open reading frames (uORFs) can mediate translational control over the largest, or major ORF (mORF) in response to starvation, polyamine concentrations, and sucrose concentrations. One plant uORF with...
Ancient whole genome duplications have been implicated in the vertebrate and teleost radiations, and in the emergence of diverse angiosperm lineages, but the evolutionary response to such a perturbation is sti...
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...
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)
2023 Speed
10 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
180 days submission to accept (Median)
2023 Usage
2,378,081 downloads
3,761 Altmetric mentions
This journal is participating in a pilot of NISO/STM's Working Group on Peer Review Taxonomy, to identify and standardize definitions and terminology in peer review practices in order to make the peer review process for articles and journals more transparent. Further information on the pilot is available here.
The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:
We welcome your feedback on this Peer Review Taxonomy Pilot. Please can you take the time to complete this short survey.
BMC Biology is recruiting new Editorial Board Members
We are looking for Editorial Board Members in all fields of biology. If you are interested in becoming an EBM please see this page.
Portable peer review
BMC Biology supports portable peer review by sharing reviews and evaluating papers based on existing reports. Learn more here.
BMC Biology is a member of the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium.
