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Thalamocortical projections convey visual, somatosensory and auditory information to the cerebral cortex. A recent report in Neural Development shows how a forward genetic screen has enabled the identification of...
Leaf-cutting (attine) ants use their own fecal material to manure fungus gardens, which consist of leaf material overgrown by hyphal threads of the basidiomycete fungus Leucocoprinus gongylophorus that lives in s...
Determining the position and order of contigs and scaffolds from a genome assembly within an organism's genome remains a technical challenge in a majority of sequencing projects. In order to exploit contempora...
The uptake of particles by actin-powered invagination of the plasma membrane is common to protozoa and to phagocytes involved in the immune response of higher organisms. The question addressed here is how a ph...
The cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) inhibitor p27Kip1 is downregulated in a majority of human cancers due to ectopic proteolysis by the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway. The expression of p27 is subject to multiple mec...
Gut homeostasis is central to whole organism health, and its disruption is associated with a broad range of pathologies. Following damage, complex physiological events are required in the gut to maintain prope...
Studies on innate immunity have benefited from the introduction of zebrafish as a model system. Transgenic fish expressing fluorescent proteins in leukocyte populations allow direct, quantitative visualization...
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is relatively common in plant mitochondrial genomes but the mechanisms, extent and consequences of transfer remain largely unknown. Previous results indicate that parasitic plant...
The zebrafish is proving to be an extremely versatile new experimental model for unraveling the mysteries of innate immunity and has considerable promise as a system for the identification of novel modulators ...
Parasitic plants and their hosts have proven remarkably adept at exchanging fragments of mitochondrial DNA. Two recent studies provide important mechanistic insights into the pattern, process and consequences ...
Discovery that the transcriptional output of the human genome is far more complex than predicted by the current set of protein-coding annotations and that most RNAs produced do not appear to encode proteins ha...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2011 9:86
Whole genome duplication (WGD) is a special case of gene duplication, observed rarely in animals, whereby all genes duplicate simultaneously through polyploidisation. Two rounds of WGD (2R-WGD) occurred at the...
Vertebrates are the result of an ancient double duplication of the genome. A new study published in BMC Biology explores the selective retention of genes after this event, finding an extensive enrichment of signa...
Conservation of orthologous regulatory gene expression domains, especially along the neuroectodermal anterior-posterior axis, in animals as disparate as flies and vertebrates suggests that common patterning me...
Invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells differ from other T cells by their hyperactive effector T-cell status, in addition to the expression of NK lineage receptors and semi-invariant T-cell receptors. It is g...
The RNA polymerase 'bridge helix' is a metastable α-helix that spans the leading edge of the enzyme active-site cleft. A new study published in BMC Biology reveals surprising tolerance to helix-disrupting changes...
A recent article in BMC Bioinformatics describes new advances in workflow systems for computational modeling in systems biology. Such systems can accelerate, and improve the consistency of, modeling through autom...
Understanding the evolutionary genetics of modern crop phenotypes has a dual relevance to evolutionary biology and crop improvement. Modern upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) was developed following thousands ...
Investigations on the nature of genetic changes underpinning plant domestication have begun to shed light on the evolutionary history of crops and can guide improvements to modern cultivars. A recent study foc...
Polymodal, nociceptive sensory neurons are key cellular elements of the way animals sense aversive and painful stimuli. In Caenorhabditis elegans, the polymodal nociceptive ASH sensory neurons detect aversive sti...
A new study of divergence in freshwater fish provides strong evidence of rapid, temperature-mediated adaptation. This study is particularly important in the ongoing debate over the extent and significance of e...
White-nose syndrome (WNS) is causing unprecedented declines in several species of North American bats. The characteristic lesions of WNS are caused by the fungus Geomyces destructans, which erodes and replaces th...
Cellular RNA polymerases (RNAPs) are complex molecular machines that combine catalysis with concerted conformational changes in the active center. Previous work showed that kinking of a hinge region near the C...
Color vision plays a critical role in visual behavior. An animal's capacity for color vision rests on the presence of differentially sensitive cone photoreceptors. Spectral sensitivity is a measure of the visu...
Unrepaired DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) cause chromosomal rearrangements, loss of genetic information, neoplastic transformation or cell death. The nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) pathway, catalyzing seq...
Several recent papers, including one in BMC Evolutionary Biology, examine the colonization history of house mice. As well as background for the analysis of mouse adaptation, such studies offer a perspective on th...
Oral vaccines, whether living or non-living, viral or bacterial, elicit diminished immune responses or have lower efficacy in developing countries than in developed countries. Here I describe studies with a li...
The visual pathway is tasked with processing incoming signals from the retina and converting this information into adaptive behavior. Recent studies of the larval zebrafish tectum have begun to clarify how the...
A growing body of evidence has shown that Krüppel-like transcription factors play a crucial role in maintaining embryonic stem cell (ESC) pluripotency and in governing ESC fate decisions. Krüppel-like factor 5...
Recent papers have demonstrated a role for Krüppel-like transcription factors 2, 4 and 5 in the control of mouse embryonic stem cell pluripotency. However, it is not clear whether each factor has a unique role...
The recent identification of the gammaretrovirus XMRV and a second gammaretrovirus of a different subtype in chronic fatigue syndrome has aroused much interest, not least among sufferers. However, it remains h...
An increasing number of publications demonstrate conservation of function of cis-regulatory elements without sequence similarity. In invertebrates such functional conservation has only been shown for closely r...
A study using phylogenetic hypothesis testing, published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, suggests that non-mimetic forms of the North American white admiral butterfly evolved from a mimetic ancestor. This case might...
Abdominal wounding by traumatic insemination and the lack of a long distance attraction pheromone set the scene for unusual sexual signalling systems. Male bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) mount any large, newly fed ...
A recent study in BMC Biology has determined that the immature stage of the bed bug (the nymph) signals its reproductive status to adult males using pheromones and thus avoids the trauma associated with copulatio...
This article is a response to Klütsch and Crapon de Caprona
This paper is a response to Gray MM, Sutter NB, Ostrander EA, Wayne RK: The IGF1 small dog haplotype is derived from Middle Eastern grey wolves. BMC Biology 2010, 8:16.
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2010 8:16
Most organisms have evolved a circadian clock in order to anticipate daily environmental changes and many of these organisms are also capable of sophisticated measurement of daylength (photoperiodism) that is ...
Insects, like most organisms, have an internal circadian clock that oscillates with a daily rhythmicity, and a timing mechanism that mediates seasonal events, including diapause. In research published in BMC B...
Relaxed molecular clock models allow divergence time dating and "relaxed phylogenetic" inference, in which a time tree is estimated in the face of unequal rates across lineages. We present a new method for rel...
Hormones are critical for early gonadal development in nonmammalian vertebrates, and oestrogen is required for normal ovarian development. In contrast, mammals determine sex by the presence or absence of the SRY ...
Oestrogen exerts a robust yet imperfectly understood effect on sexual development in vertebrate embryos. New work by Pask and colleagues in BMC Biology indicates that it may interfere with male development by ...
Human cases of plague (Yersinia pestis) infection originate, ultimately, in the bacterium's wildlife host populations. The epidemiological dynamics of the wildlife reservoir therefore determine the abundance, dis...
Pandemics of bubonic plague have occurred in Eurasia since the sixth century AD. Climatic variations in Central Asia affect the population size and activity of the plague bacterium's reservoir rodent species, ...
The characterization of the molecular changes that underlie the origin and diversification of morphological novelties is a key challenge in evolutionary developmental biology. The evolution of such traits is t...
Attine ants live in an intensely studied tripartite mutualism with the fungus Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, which provides food to the ants, and with antibiotic-producing actinomycete bacteria. One hypothesis sugg...
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