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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 ...
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...
Kinesin-14 motor proteins step towards microtubule minus ends, in the opposite direction to other kinesins. Work on the still-enigmatic kinesin-14 mechanism published in BMC Structural Biology shows that the carb...
A re-examination of the mitochondrial genomes of unisexual salamander lineages, published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, shows them to be the oldest unisexual vertebrates known, having been around for 5 million yea...
CTCF is a versatile zinc finger DNA-binding protein that functions as a highly conserved epigenetic transcriptional regulator. CTCF is known to act as a chromosomal insulator, bind promoter regions, and facili...
The nuclear factor CTCF has been shown to be necessary for the maintenance of genetic imprinting at the mammalian H19/Igf2 locus. MacDonald and colleagues now report in BMC Biology that the mechanisms responsible...
The Hedgehog (Hh) signaling pathway differentially utilizes the primary cilium in mammals and fruit flies. Recent work, including a study in BMC Biology, demonstrates that Hh signals through the cilium in zebrafi...
Whilst parthenogenesis has evolved multiple times from sexual invertebrate and vertebrate lineages, the drivers and consequences of the sex-asex transition remain mostly uncertain. A model by Stouthamer et al. re...
The evolution of multicellular motile organisms from unicellular ancestors required the utilization of previously evolved tactic behavior in a multicellular context. Volvocine green algae are uniquely suited f...
Mitochondria are highly dynamic organelles whose morphology and position within the cell is tightly coupled to metabolic function. There is a limited list of essential proteins that regulate mitochondrial morp...
Mitochondrial fusion is an essential process for preserving the integrity and stability of mitochondrial DNA; however, regulation of this process remains largely mysterious. In this issue of BMC Biology, Schauss ...
Several recent papers illustrate the importance of migration and gene flow in molding the patterns of genetic variation observed in humans today. We place the varied demographic processes covered by these term...
Mutation of the protein spartin is a cause of one form of spastic paraplegia. Spartin interacts with ubiquitin ligases of the Nedd4 family, and a recent report in BMC Biology now shows that it acts as an adaptor ...
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) look for correlations between traits of interest and genetic markers spread throughout the genome. A recent study in BMC Genetics has found that populations of the malaria p...
It has been proposed that the use of gene expression microarrays in nonrecombinant parental or congenic strains can accelerate the process of isolating individual genes underlying quantitative trait loci (QTL)...
Transcriptomics is used to quantify changes in accumulated levels of mRNAs following cellular activation. These changes arise from the opposing fluxes of transcription and mRNA decay, both of which affect the ...
Blood is the pipeline of the immune system. Assessing changes in transcript abundance in blood on a genome-wide scale affords a comprehensive view of the status of the immune system in health and disease. This...
In the permanent daylight conditions north of the Arctic circle, there is a unique opportunity for bumblebee foragers to maximise intake, and therefore colony growth, by remaining active during the entire avai...
The gene daf-2 encodes the single insulin/insulin growth factor-1-like receptor of Caenorhabditis elegans. The reduction-of-function allele e1370 induces several metabolic alterations and doubles lifespan.
A recent paper in BMC Structural Biology reports the crystal structure of human prolylcarboxypeptidase (PRCP), one of the two members of the S28 peptidase family. Comparison of the substrate-binding site of PRCP ...
Cancer cells have different metabolic requirements from their normal counterparts. Understanding the consequences of this differential metabolism requires a detailed understanding of glucose metabolism and its...
Reporter genes are widely used in biology and only a limited number are available. We present a new reporter gene for the localization of mammalian cells and transgenic tissues based on detection of the bglA (SYN...
The basis for transcriptional fidelity by RNA polymerase is not understood, but the 'trigger loop', a conserved structural element that is rearranged in the presence of correct substrate nucleotides, is though...
A recent paper in BMC Developmental Biology reports that a mitochondrial iron importer is required for Drosophila male fertility and normal mitochondrial shaping in spermatids. This suggests that mitochondrial mo...
The downstream of tyrosine kinase/docking protein (Dok) adaptor protein family has seven members, Dok1 to Dok7, that act as substrates of multiple receptor tyrosine kinase and non-receptor tyrosine kinase. The...
Within their territories, damselfish cultivate particular algae for consumption. A recent study in BMC Evolutionary Biology shows extensive variation among and within fish species in the composition of these alga...
A recent report in BMC Biology on the discovery and analysis of biosynthetic genes for ribosomal peptide natural products confirms that these pathways are much more common and diverse than previously suspected, c...
The identification of an increasing number of cancer genes is opening up unexpected scenarios in cancer genetics. When analyzed for their systemic properties, these genes show a general fragility towards pertu...
The original article was published in Journal of Biology 2009 8:30
The Drosophila Male Specific Lethal (MSL) complex contains chromatin modifying enzymes and non-coding roX RNA. It paints the male X at hundreds of bands where it acetylates histone H4 at lysine 16. This epigeneti...
Many heterotrophic organisms sequester plastids from prey algae and temporarily utilize their photosynthetic capacity. A recent article in BMC Genomics reveals that the dinoflagellate Dinophysis acuminata has acq...
Thousands of behavioral mutants of Caenorhabditis elegans have been studied. I suggest a set of criteria by which some genes important in the evolution of behavior might be recognized, and identify neuropeptide s...
Monoclonal antibodies with high affinity and selectivity that work on wholemount fixed tissues are valuable reagents to the cell and developmental biologist, and yet isolating them remains a long and unpredict...
Among invertebrates, specific pheromones elicit inherent (fixed) behavioural responses to coordinate social behaviours such as sexual recognition and attraction. By contrast, the much more complex social odour...
A study in the current issue of BMC Biology has identified a mouse major urinary protein as a pheromone that attracts female mice to male urine marks and induces a learned attraction to the volatile urinary odor ...
Spartin protein is involved in degradation of epidermal growth factor receptor and turnover of lipid droplets and a lack of expression of this protein is responsible for hereditary spastic paraplegia type 20 (...
A new family of natural products has been described in which cysteine, serine and threonine from ribosomally-produced peptides are converted to thiazoles, oxazoles and methyloxazoles, respectively. These metab...
Reemergence of carcinomas following chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy is not well understood, but a recent study in BMC Cancer suggests that resistance to apoptosis resulting from altered cell cycle regulation is ...
A recent paper published in BMC Genomics suggests that retrotransposition may be active in the human gut parasite Entamoeba histolytica. This adds to our knowledge of the various types of repetitive elements in p...
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