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The original article was published in BMC Biology 2021 19:200
Shipworms are marine xylophagus bivalve molluscs, which can live on a diet solely of wood due to their ability to produce plant cell wall-degrading enzymes. Bacterial carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes), syn...
Flowering plants (angiosperms) are dominant components of global terrestrial ecosystems, but phylogenetic relationships at the familial level and above remain only partially resolved, greatly impeding our full...
The detection of environmental cues and signals via the sensory system directs behavioral choices in diverse organisms. Insect larvae rely on input from the chemosensory system, mainly olfaction, for locating ...
Blowflies are ubiquitous insects, often shiny and metallic, and the larvae of many species provide important ecosystem services (e.g., recycling carrion) and are used in forensics and debridement therapy. Yet,...
Mitochondrial dynamics is the result of a dynamic balance between fusion and fission events, which are driven via a set of mitochondria-shaping proteins. These proteins are generally considered to be binary co...
Mitochondrial nucleoside diphosphate kinase (NDPK-D, NME4, NM23-H4) is a multifunctional enzyme mainly localized in the intermembrane space, bound to the inner membrane.
Female reproductive behaviors and physiology change profoundly after mating. The control of pregnancy-associated changes in physiology and behaviors are largely hard-wired into the brain to guarantee reproduct...
Cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) is a ubiquitous second messenger that transduces extracellular signals in virtually all eukaryotic cells. The soluble Beggiatoa photoactivatable adenylyl cyclase (bPAC) rapid...
Cell-free DNA (cfDNA), which is extracellular DNA present in the circulating plasma and other body fluids, is currently investigated as a minimally invasive, highly informative biomarker. While nucleosome-size...
The human foetus typically needs to rotate when passing through the tight birth canal because of the complex shape of the pelvis. In most women, the upper part, or inlet, of the birth canal has a round or medi...
Characterizing phage–host interactions is critical to understanding the ecological role of both partners and effective isolation of phage therapeuticals. Unfortunately, experimental methods for studying these ...
The zinc-finger transcription factor Krüppel-homolog 1 (Kr-h1) exerts a dual regulatory role during insect development by preventing precocious larval/nymphal metamorphosis and in stimulating aspects of adult ...
Skin-penetrating nematodes of the genus Strongyloides infect over 600 million people, posing a major global health burden. Their life cycle includes both a parasitic and free-living generation. During the parasit...
Hansen’s disease (leprosy), widespread in medieval Europe, is today mainly prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions with around 200,000 new cases reported annually. Despite its long history and appearance...
Plasmodium simium, a malaria parasite of non-human primates (NHP), was recently shown to cause zoonotic infections in humans in Brazil. We sequenced the P. simium genome to investigate its evolutionary history an...
Niemann-Pick disease, type C (NPC) is a childhood-onset, lethal, neurodegenerative disorder caused by autosomal recessive mutations in the genes NPC1 or NPC2 and characterized by impaired cholesterol homeostasis,...
DNA barcodes are a useful tool for discovering, understanding, and monitoring biodiversity which are critical tasks at a time of rapid biodiversity loss. However, widespread adoption of barcodes requires cost-...
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2021 19:170
Maturation is a process that allows synapses to acquire full functionality, optimizing their activity to diverse neural circuits, and defects in synaptic maturation may contribute to neurodevelopmental disorde...
How microbes affect host fitness and environmental adaptation has become a fundamental research question in evolutionary biology. To better understand the role of microbial genomic variation for host fitness, ...
Yeast one-hybrid (Y1H) is a common technique for identifying DNA-protein interactions, and robotic platforms have been developed for high-throughput analyses to unravel the gene regulatory networks in many org...
Activation of gene expression in striped domains is a key building block of biological patterning, from the recursive formation of veins in plant leaves to that of ribs and vertebrae in our bodies. In animals,...
Advances in three-dimensional culture technologies have led to progression in systems used to model the gonadal microenvironment in vitro. Despite demonstrating basic functionality, tissue organisation is ofte...
Glossina species (tsetse flies), the sole vectors of African trypanosomes, maintained along their long evolutionary history a unique reproductive strategy, adenotrophic viviparity. Viviparity reduces their reprod...
Species co-occurrences can have profound effects on the habitat use of species, and therefore habitat structure alone cannot fully explain observed abundances. To account for this aspect of community organizat...
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2021 19:1
Variability is a hallmark of animal behavior. It contributes to survival by endowing individuals and populations with the capacity to adapt to ever-changing environmental conditions. Intra-individual variabili...
Intra-tumor heterogeneity (ITH) encompasses cellular differences in tumors and is related to clinical outcomes such as drug resistance. However, little is known about the dynamics of ITH, owing to the lack of ...
Eukaryotic genomes are known to display an enormous variation in size, but the evolutionary causes of this phenomenon are still poorly understood. To obtain mechanistic insights into such variation, previous s...
Pineal-related organs in cyclostomes, teleosts, amphibians, and reptiles exhibit color opponency, generating antagonistic neural responses to different wavelengths of light and thereby sensory information abou...
The cuticular microbiomes of Acromyrmex leaf-cutting ants pose a conundrum in microbiome biology because they are freely colonisable, and yet the prevalence of the vertically transmitted bacteria Pseudonocardia, ...
Murray’s Law, which describes the branching architecture of bifurcating tubes, predicts the morphology of vessels in many amniotes and plants. Here, we use insects to explore the universality of Murray’s Law a...
Silencing of transposable elements (TEs) is essential for maintaining genome stability. Plants use small RNAs (sRNAs) to direct DNA methylation to TEs (RNA-directed DNA methylation; RdDM). Similar mechanisms o...
The world’s fast disappearing mangrove forests have low plant diversity and are often assumed to also have a species-poor insect fauna. We here compare the tropical arthropod fauna across a freshwater swamp an...
Gravity plays an important role in most life forms on Earth. Yet, a complete molecular understanding of sensing and responding to gravity is lacking. While there are anatomical differences among animals, there...
Hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell (HSPC) subsets in mice have previously been studied using cell surface markers, and more recently single-cell technologies. The recent revolution of single-cell analysis ...
Although oocyte quality is the dominant factor determining embryo quality, few studies have been conducted to evaluate embryo quality based on the metabolites related to the oocyte. With quantification of the ...
The Publisher Correction to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2021 19:234
The microtubule-associated protein tau forms aggregates in different neurodegenerative diseases called tauopathies. Prior work has shown that a single P301L mutation in tau gene, MAPT, can promote alternative tau...
Deciphering the functions of Y chromosome in mammals has been slow owing to the presence of repeats. Some of these repeats transcribe coding RNAs, the roles of which have been studied. Functions of the noncodi...
Characterization of the molecular mechanisms underlying hair follicle development is of paramount importance in the genetic improvement of wool-related traits in sheep and skin-related traits in humans. The Me...
The biophysics of an organism span multiple scales from subcellular to organismal and include processes characterized by spatial properties, such as the diffusion of molecules, cell migration, and flow of intr...
QconCATs are quantitative concatamers for proteomic applications that yield stoichiometric quantities of sets of stable isotope-labelled internal standards. However, changing a QconCAT design, for example, to ...
KDEL receptor helps establish cellular equilibrium in the early secretory pathway by recycling leaked ER-chaperones to the ER during secretion of newly synthesized proteins. Studies have also shown that KDEL r...
The presence of mitochondria is a distinguishing feature between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. It is currently accepted that the evolutionary origin of mitochondria coincided with the formation of eukaryot...
Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are important regulators in tumor progression. However, their biological functions and underlying mechanisms in hypoxia adaptation remain largely unclear.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is among the gravest threats to human health and food security worldwide. The use of antimicrobials in livestock production can lead to emergence of AMR, which can have direct ef...
Urbanization is rapidly changing our planet and animals that live in urban environments must quickly adjust their behavior. One of the most prevalent behavioral characteristics of urban dwelling animals is an ...
The identification of open chromatin regions and transcription factor binding sites (TFBs) is an important step in understanding the regulation of gene expression in diverse species. ATAC-seq is a technique us...
A number of cellular processes have evolved in metazoans that increase the proteome repertoire in relation to the genome, such as alternative splicing and translation recoding. Another such process, translatio...
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