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The sterile insect technique (SIT) is an environment-friendly method used in area-wide pest management of the Mediterranean fruit fly Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann; Diptera: Tephritidae). Ionizing radiation used ...
Methods for assigning strains to bacterial species are cumbersome and no longer fit for purpose. The concatenated sequences of multiple house-keeping genes have been shown to be able to define and circumscribe...
Host-symbiont co-speciation and reductive genome evolution have been commonly observed among obligate endocellular insect symbionts, while such examples have rarely been identified among extracellular ones, th...
Microarray analysis and 454 cDNA sequencing were used to investigate a centuries-old problem in regenerative biology: the basis of nerve-dependent limb regeneration in salamanders. Innervated (NR) and denervat...
Past studies in the legume family (Fabaceae) have uncovered several evolutionary trends including differential mutation and diversification rates across varying taxonomic levels. The legume tribe Psoraleeae is...
Tropical rain forests are the most diverse terrestrial ecosystems on the planet. How this diversity evolved remains largely unexplained. In Africa, rain forests are situated in two geographically isolated regi...
Avoidance of noxious stimuli is essential for the survival of an animal in its natural habitat. Some avoidance responses require polymodal sensory neurons, which sense a range of diverse stimuli, whereas other...
In red blood cells, protein 4.1 (4.1R) is an 80 kDa protein that stabilizes the spectrin-actin network and anchors it to the plasma membrane through its FERM domain. While the expression pattern of 4.1R in mat...
Immune response pathways have been relatively well-conserved across animal species, with similar systems in both mammals and invertebrates. Interestingly, honey bees have substantially reduced numbers of genes...
In recent years, the maturation of microarray technology has allowed the genome-wide analysis of gene expression patterns to identify tissue-specific and ubiquitously expressed ('housekeeping') genes. We have ...
The mammary gland undergoes a sophisticated programme of developmental changes during pregnancy/lactation. However, little is known about processes involving initiation of apoptosis at involution following wea...
Given the costs of signalling, why do males often advertise their fighting ability to rivals using several signals rather than just one? Multiple signalling theories have developed largely in studies of sexual...
Theory predicts that lower dispersal, and associated gene flow, leads to decreased genetic diversity in small isolated populations, which generates adverse consequences for fitness, and subsequently for demogr...
The phylogeography of the Y chromosome in Asia previously suggested that modern humans of African origin initially settled in mainland southern East Asia, and about 25,000–30,000 years ago, migrated northward,...
Fossorial mammals face natural selection pressures that differ from those acting on surface dwelling animals, and these may lead to reduced visual system development. We have studied eye development in a speci...
Persistent infections with mutualistic intracellular bacteria (endosymbionts) are well represented in insects and are considered to be a driving force in evolution. However, while pathogenic relationships have...
Chemoreceptor proteins mediate the first step in the transduction of environmental chemical stimuli, defining the breadth of detection and conferring stimulus specificity. Animal genomes contain families of ge...
Many insects jump by storing and releasing energy in elastic structures within their bodies. This allows them to release large amounts of energy in a very short time to jump at very high speeds. The fastest of...
Transgenic animals are widely used in biomedical research and biotechnology. Multicistronic constructs, in which several proteins are encoded by a single messenger RNA, are commonly used in genetically enginee...
The transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, otherwise known as prion diseases, occur following the conversion of the cellular prion protein (PrPC) to an alternatively folded, disease-associated isoform (PrPSc)...
In pathogens, certain genes encoding proteins that directly interact with host defences coevolve with their host and are subject to positive selection. In the lepidopteran host-wasp parasitoid system, one of t...
Erythropoietin (EPO) improves cognition of human subjects in the clinical setting by as yet unknown mechanisms. We developed a mouse model of robust cognitive improvement by EPO to obtain the first clues of ho...
The gene expression system of chloroplasts is far more complex than that of their cyanobacterial progenitor. This gain in complexity affects in particular RNA metabolism, specifically the transcription and mat...
Gene duplication provides opportunities for lineage diversification and evolution of developmental novelties. Duplicated genes generally either disappear by accumulation of mutations (nonfunctionalization), or...
Vertebrate alpha (α)- and beta (β)-globin gene families exemplify the way in which genomes evolve to produce functional complexity. From tandem duplication of a single globin locus, the α- and β-globin cluster...
Traditional comparative morphological analyses and subsequent three-dimensional reconstructions suffer from a number of drawbacks. This is particularly evident in the case of soft tissue studies that are techn...
Periodic patterning of iterative structures is a fundamental process during embryonic organization and development. Studies have shown how gene networks are employed to pattern butterfly eyespots, fly bristles...
Mutations in SPG4 cause the most common form of autosomal dominant hereditary spastic paraplegia, a neurodegenerative disease characterized by weakness and spasticity of the lower limbs due to degeneration of the...
We have applied a high-throughput pyrosequencing technology for transcriptome profiling of Caenorhabditis elegans in its first larval stage. Using this approach, we have generated a large amount of data for expre...
tmRNA acts first as a tRNA and then as an mRNA to rescue stalled ribosomes in eubacteria. Two unanswered questions about tmRNA function remain: how does tmRNA, lacking an anticodon, bypass the decoding machine...
Genetic tests of paleoecological hypotheses have been rare, partly because recent genetic divergence is difficult to detect and time. According to fossil plant data, continuous woodland in the southwestern USA...
Inherited bacteria have come to be recognised as important components of arthropod biology. In addition to mutualistic symbioses, a range of other inherited bacteria are known to act either as reproductive par...
Arsenic is a toxic and highly abundant metalloid that endangers human health through drinking water and the food chain. The most common forms of arsenic in the environment are arsenate (As(V)) and arsenite (As...
New methods are needed for research into non-model organisms, to monitor the effects of toxic disruption at both the molecular and functional organism level. We exposed earthworms (Lumbricus rubellus Hoffmeister)...
The aging of reproductive organs is not only a major social issue, but of special interest in aging research. A long-standing view of 'immortal germ line versus mortal soma' poses an important question of whet...
Geographic selection mosaics, in which species exert different evolutionary impacts on each other in different environments, may drive diversification in coevolving species. We studied the potential for geogra...
Cichlid fishes have radiated into hundreds of species in the Great Lakes of Africa. Brightly colored males display on leks and vie to be chosen by females as mates. Strong discrimination by females causes diff...
The y-larva, a crustacean larval type first identified more than 100 years ago, has been found in marine plankton samples collected in the arctic, temperate and tropical regions of all oceans. The great specie...
Explaining public-goods cooperation is a challenge for evolutionary biology. However, cooperation is expected to more readily evolve if it imposes a smaller cost. Such costs of cooperation are expected to decl...
A central question in evolutionary biology is how cryptic species maintain species cohesiveness in an area of sympatry. The coexistence of sympatrically living cryptic species requires the evolution of species...
Flying lemurs or Colugos (order Dermoptera) represent an ancient mammalian lineage that contains only two extant species. Although molecular evidence strongly supports that the orders Dermoptera, Scandentia, L...
Thermogenic brown adipose tissue has never been described in birds or other non-mammalian vertebrates. Brown adipocytes in mammals are distinguished from the more common white fat adipocytes by having numerous...
Polyploidy has played a prominent role in shaping the genomic architecture of the angiosperms. Through allopolyploidization, several modern Gossypium (cotton) species contain two divergent, although largely redun...
The proneural proteins Mash1 and Ngn2 are key cell autonomous regulators of neurogenesis in the mammalian central nervous system, yet little is known about the molecular pathways regulated by these transcripti...
Afrotheria comprises a newly recognized clade of mammals with strong molecular evidence for its monophyly. In contrast, morphological data uniting its diverse constituents, including elephants, sea cows, hyrax...
In the 15 years that have passed since the cloning of Aequorea victoria green fluorescent protein (avGFP), the expanding set of fluorescent protein (FP) variants has become entrenched as an indispensable toolkit ...
Double-stranded (ds) RNA, generated during viral infection, binds and activates the mammalian anti-viral protein kinase PKR, which phosphorylates the translation initiation factor eIF2α leading to the general ...
The invasive garden ant, Lasius neglectus, is the most recently detected pest ant and the first known invasive ant able to become established and thrive in the temperate regions of Eurasia. In this study, we aim ...
The Correction to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2018 16:128
In order to initiate plant infection, fungal spores must germinate and penetrate into the host plant. Many fungal species differentiate specialized infection structures called appressoria on the host surface, ...
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