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The fruit fly Drosophila has contributed significantly to our general understanding of the basic principles of signaling, cell and developmental biology, and neurobiology. However, answers to questions pertaining...
First discovered in Drosophila, the Hedgehog signaling pathway controls a wide range of developmental processes and is implicated in a variety of cancers. The success of a screen for chemical modulators of this p...
The identification of a complex containing the tumor suppressor LKB1 as the critical upstream kinase required for the activation of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) by metabolic stress was reported in an ar...
The huge variation between mitochondrial genomes makes untangling their evolutionary histories difficult. Richardson et al. report on the remarkably unaltered ‘fossil’ genome of the tulip tree, giving us many clu...
The mitochondrial genomes of flowering plants vary greatly in size, gene content, gene order, mutation rate and level of RNA editing. However, the narrow phylogenetic breadth of available genomic data has limi...
In theory, the human genome is large enough to keep its roughly 20,000 genes well separated. In practice, genes are clustered; even more puzzling, in many cases both DNA strands of a protein coding gene are tr...
The pituitary gland is formed by the juxtaposition of two tissues: neuroectoderm arising from the basal diencephalon, and oral epithelium, which invaginates towards the central nervous system from the roof of ...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2013 11:70
Thyroid hormone (TH) is best known for its role in development in animals, and for its control of metabolic heat production (thermogenesis) during cold acclimation in mammals. It is unknown whether the regulat...
Copy-number variation (CNV), rather than complete loss of gene function, is increasingly implicated in human disease. Moreover, gene dosage is recognised as important in tumourigenesis, and there is an increas...
Although intron loss in evolution has been described, the mechanism involved is still unclear. Three models have been proposed, the reverse transcriptase (RT) model, genomic deletion model and double-strand-br...
The directional migration and the following development of primordial germ cells (PGCs) during gonad formation are key steps for germline development. It has been proposed that the interaction between germ cel...
Vertebrate predators use a broad arsenal of behaviors and weaponry for overcoming fractious and potentially dangerous prey. A unique array of predatory strategies occur among snakes, ranging from mechanical mo...
The nuclear factor-KappaB (NF-κB) pathway is conserved from fruit flies to humans and is a key mediator of inflammatory signaling. Aberrant regulation of NF-κB is associated with several disorders including au...
Methanobactins (Mbns) are a family of copper-binding natural products involved in copper uptake by methanotrophic bacteria. The few Mbns that have been structurally characterized feature copper coordination by...
A number of studies have established that stochasticity in gene expression may play an important role in many biological phenomena. This therefore calls for further investigations to identify the molecular mec...
Mutations causing antibiotic resistance are often associated with a cost in the absence of antibiotics. Surprisingly, a new study found that bacteria adapting to increased temperature became resistant to rifam...
In the mouse ovary, oocytes initially develop in clusters termed germ-cell nests. Shortly after birth, these germ-cell nests break apart, and the oocytes individually become surrounded by somatic granulosa cel...
Skeletal muscle undergoes rapid atrophy upon denervation and the underlying mechanisms are complicated. FOXO3a has been implicated as a major mediator of muscle atrophy, but how its subcellular location and ac...
Drosophila melanogaster has served as a powerful model system for genetic studies of courtship songs. To accelerate research on the genetic and neural mechanisms underlying courtship song, we have developed a sen...
In caves one repeatedly finds strikingly convergent patterns of evolution in diverse sets of organisms involving 'regressive' traits such as the loss of eyes and pigmentation. Ongoing debate centers around whe...
Significant effects of recent global climate change have already been observed in a variety of ecosystems, with evidence for shifts in species ranges, but rarely have such consequences been related to the chan...
The propensity of cancer cells to convert high levels of glucose to lactate through aerobic glycolysis has been intensively studied in vitro, and is now understood to be a metabolic adaptation that shunts glucose...
DNA methylation serves as an important epigenetic mark in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. In eukaryotes, the most common epigenetic mark is 5-methylcytosine, whereas prokaryotes can have 6-methylade...
Contrary to the longstanding view that newts (Notophthalamus viridescens), but notaxolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum), can regenerate a lens, a recent report in BMC Biologyby Panagiotis Tsonis and colleagues shows axo...
Like human infants, songbirds learn their species-specific vocalizations through imitation learning. The birdsong system has emerged as a widely used experimental animal model for understanding the underlying ...
How and why animals lose eyesight during adaptation to the dark and food-limited cave environment has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin. More recently, several different adaptive hypotheses have been...
Calcium-activated photoproteins are luciferase variants found in photocyte cells of bioluminescent jellyfish (Phylum Cnidaria) and comb jellies (Phylum Ctenophora). The complete genomic sequence from the cteno...
The dramatic ingression of tissue sheets that accompanies many morphogenetic processes, most notably gastrulation, has been largely attributed to contractile circum-apical actomyosin 'purse-strings' in the inf...
The clockwise rotation of cilia in the developing mammalian embryo drives a leftward flow of liquid; this genetically regulated biophysical force specifies left-right asymmetry of the mammalian body. How leftw...
Males and females differ in many ways and might present different opportunities and challenges to their parasites. In the same way that parasites adapt to the most common host type, they may adapt to the chara...
Among vertebrates lens regeneration is most pronounced in newts, which have the ability to regenerate the entire lens throughout their lives. Regeneration occurs from the dorsal iris by transdifferentiation of...
In the absence of a vaccine or a cure, identification of novel HIV-1 inhibitors remains important. A paper in Retrovirology describes a rationally designed bi-specific protein that irreversibly damages the viral ...
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