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Ultra-high throughput sequencing technologies provide opportunities both for discovery of novel molecular species and for detailed comparisons of gene expression patterns. Small RNA populations are particularl...
Small interfering RNAs can trigger unintended, microRNA-like off-target effects, but the impact of these effects on functional studies has been controversial. A recent study in BMC Genomics shows that microRNA-li...
The interfacial molecular mechanisms that regulate mammalian cell growth and differentiation have important implications for biotechnology (production of cells and cell products) and medicine (tissue engineeri...
The circadian clock enhances fitness through temporal organization of plant gene expression, metabolism and physiology. Two recent studies, one in BMC Evolutionary Biology, demonstrate through phylogenetic analys...
Transcription is the first step of gene expression and is characterized by a high fidelity of RNA synthesis. During transcription, the RNA polymerase active centre discriminates against not just non-complement...
Next-generation sequencing can be used to compare transcriptomes under different conditions. A study in BMC Genomics applies this approach to investigating the effects of exposure to a range of xenobiotics on cha...
Little is known about the genetic mechanisms underlying inducible defenses. Recently, the genome of Daphnia pulex, a model organism for defense studies, has been sequenced. Building on the genome information, rec...
The phylogenetic systematics of bovin species forms a common basis for studies at multiple scales, from the level of domestication in populations to major cladogenesis. The main big-picture accomplishments of ...
Molecular interaction networks provide a window on the workings of the cell. However, combining various types of networks into one coherent large-scale dynamic model remains a formidable challenge. A recent pa...
The mitogen-activated protein kinase p38 (p38 MAPK) is activated by a number of stresses. A recent study in BMC Genomics has uncovered the early transcriptional responses to three types of stress and has demonstr...
As high-throughput technologies rapidly generate genome-scale data, it becomes increasingly important to visually integrate these data so that specific hypotheses can be formulated and tested.
Population genetic analyses of Eurasian wolves published recently in BMC Evolutionary Biology suggest that a major genetic turnover took place in Eurasian wolves after the Pleistocene. These results add to the gr...
The majority of convincingly documented cases of hybridization in angiosperms has involved genetic introgression between the parental species or formation of a hybrid species with increased ploidy; however, ho...
In mammalian cells, the integrity of the primary cilium is critical for proper regulation of the Hedgehog (Hh) signal transduction pathway. Whether or not this dependence on the primary cilium is a universal f...
A culture's icons are a window onto its soul. Few would disagree that, in the culture of molecular biology that dominated much of the life sciences for the last third of the 20th century, the dominant icon was...
Most of the significant recent advances in cancer treatment have been based on the great strides that have been made in our understanding of the underlying biology of the disease. Nevertheless, the exploitatio...
For many diseases vaccines are lacking or only partly effective. Research on protective immunity and adjuvants that generate vigorous immune responses may help generate effective vaccines against such pathogens.
The various tasks of visual systems, including course control, collision avoidance and the detection of small objects, require at the neuronal level the dendritic integration and subsequent processing of many ...
Male sexually selected vocalisations generally contain both individuality and quality cues that are crucial in intra- as well as inter-sexual communication. As individuality is a fixed feature whereas male phe...
One of the four principal categories of cell-cell junctions that hold together and shape distinct tissues and organs in vertebrates, adherens junctions (AJs) form cell-cell contacts that connect transmembrane ...
Neoplastic overgrowth depends on the cooperation of several mutations ultimately leading to major rearrangements in cellular behaviour. Precancerous cells are often removed by cell death from normal tissues in...
Tiny marine animals that complete their life cycle in the total absence of light and oxygen are reported by Roberto Danovaro and colleagues in this issue of BMC Biology. These fascinating animals are new members ...
The sediments of a deep-sea hypersaline and sulfidic Mediterranean basin have yielded an unexpected discovery, the first multicellular animals living entirely without oxygen. Reported by Danovaro et al. in BMC Bi...
Several unicellular organisms (prokaryotes and protozoa) can live under permanently anoxic conditions. Although a few metazoans can survive temporarily in the absence of oxygen, it is believed that multi-cellu...
Due to its high polymorphism and importance for disease resistance, the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) has been an important focus of many vertebrate genome projects. Avian MHC organization is of parti...
Among songbirds, the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) is an excellent model system for investigating the neural mechanisms underlying complex behaviours such as vocal communication, learning and social interacti...
Self-complementary RNA transcripts form a double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) that triggers a sequence-specific mRNA degradation, in a process known as RNA interference (RNAi), leading to gene silencing. In vascular p...
Speculation regarding the importance of changes in gene regulation in determining major phylogenetic patterns continues to accrue, despite a lack of broad-scale comparative studies examining how patterns of ge...
Sexual selection theory predicts that females, being the limiting sex, invest less in courtship signals than males. However, when chemical signals are involved it is often the female that initiates mating by p...
Microbial denitrification is not considered important in human-associated microbial communities. Accordingly, metabolic investigations of the microbial biofilm communities of human dental plaque have focused o...
The ankyrin repeat and suppressor of cytokine signalling (SOCS) box proteins (Asbs) are a large protein family implicated in diverse biological processes including regulation of proliferation and differentiati...
Large-scale intervention programmes to control or eliminate several infectious diseases are currently underway worldwide. However, a major unresolved question remains: what are reasonable stopping points for t...
Replicators are the crucial entities in evolution. The notion of a replicator, however, is far less exact than the weight of its importance. Without identifying and classifying multiplying entities exactly, th...
The increased battery of molecular markers, derived from comparative genomics, is aiding our understanding of the genetics of domestication. The recent BMC Biology article pertaining to the evolution of small siz...
Among the greatest challenges for biology in the 21st century is inference of the tree of life. Interest in, and progress toward, this goal has increased dramatically with the growing availability of molecular...
Technological advances have enabled the accurate quantification of gene expression, even within single cell types. While transcriptome analyses are routinely performed, most experimental designs only provide s...
The Dlc1 (deleted in liver cancer 1) tumour suppressor gene codes for a RhoGTPase activating protein that is found inactivated in many tumour types. Several transcriptional isoforms have been described but the...
A selective sweep containing the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) gene is associated with size variation in domestic dogs. Intron 2 of IGF1 contains a SINE element and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) foun...
The Tarim Basin, located on the ancient Silk Road, played a very important role in the history of human migration and cultural communications between the West and the East. However, both the exact period at wh...
Many Caenorhabditis elegans mutations increase longevity and much evidence suggests that they do so at least partly via changes in metabolism. However, up until now there has been no systematic investigation of h...
Lignification of the fruit endocarp layer occurs in many angiosperms and plays a critical role in seed protection and dispersal. This process has been extensively studied with relationship to pod shatter or de...
Most rapidly evolving gene families are involved in immune responses and reproduction, two biological functions which have been assigned to the carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) gene family. To gain insights into...
Endothelial cell-cell junctions maintain endothelial integrity and regulate vascular morphogenesis and homeostasis. Cell-cell junctions are usually depicted with a linear morphology along the boundaries betwee...
Surveys of ontogenetic development of hearing and sound production in fish are scarce, and the ontogenetic development of acoustic communication has been investigated in only two fish species so far. Studies o...
Brain size is a key adaptive trait. It is often assumed that increasing brain size was a general evolutionary trend in primates, yet recent fossil discoveries have documented brain size decreases in some linea...
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