Page 31 of 54
The phylum Apicomplexa includes intracellular parasites causing immense global disease burden, the deadliest of them being the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which invades and replicates within ery...
Researchers have long sought to understand the genetic basis of the cognitive differences between primates, with particular focus on the human brain. Although all mutational types have worked in concert with e...
Helicoverpa armigera and Helicoverpa zea are major caterpillar pests of Old and New World agriculture, respectively. Both, particularly H. armigera, are extremely polyphagous, and H. a...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2017 15:69
The duplication of genes can occur through various mechanisms and is thought to make a major contribution to the evolutionary diversification of organisms. There is increasing evidence for a large-scale duplic...
Transmembrane helices (TMHs) frequently occur amongst protein architectures as means for proteins to attach to or embed into biological membranes. Physical constraints such as the membrane’s hydrophobicity and...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2017 15:72
Biological mineral formation (biomineralization) proceeds in specialized compartments often bounded by a lipid bilayer membrane. Currently, the role of membranes in biomineralization is hardly understood.
Human language is unique among all forms of animal communication. It is unlikely that any other species, including our close genetic cousins the Neanderthals, ever had language, and so-called sign ‘language’ i...
In addition to DNA, gametes contribute epigenetic information in the form of histones and non-coding RNA. Epigenetic programs often respond to stressful environmental conditions and provide a heritable history...
The risk of developing cancer should theoretically increase with both the number of cells and the lifespan of an organism. However, gigantic animals do not get more cancer than humans, suggesting that super-hu...
There is increasing evidence that all cells sense mechanical forces in order to perform their functions. In animals, mechanotransduction has been studied during the establishment of cell polarity, fate, and di...
Individual neurons vary widely in terms of their gene expression, morphology, and electrophysiological properties. While many techniques exist to study single-cell variability along one or two of these dimensi...
The Related Article to this article has been published in Nature Protocols 2017 12:nprot.2017.120
The aggregation of the protein ɑ-synuclein (ɑS) underlies a range of increasingly common neurodegenerative disorders including Parkinson’s disease. One widely explored therapeutic strategy for these conditions...
Odor information is processed through multiple receptor-glomerular channels in the first order olfactory center, the antennal lobe (AL), then reformatted into higher brain centers and eventually perceived by t...
Model organisms are widely used in research as accessible and convenient systems to study a particular area or question in biology. Traditionally only a handful of organisms have been widely studied, but moder...
Moloney leukemia virus 10 (Mov10) is an RNA helicase that mediates access of the RNA-induced silencing complex to messenger RNAs (mRNAs). Until now, its role as an RNA helicase and as a regulator of retrotrans...
Macrophages are present in all vertebrate tissues, from mid-gestation throughout life, constituting a widely dispersed organ system. They promote homeostasis by responding to internal and external changes with...
Strigolactones (SLs) are a class of plant hormones that control many aspects of plant growth. The SL signalling mechanism is homologous to that of karrikins (KARs), smoke-derived compounds that stimulate seed ...
Intracellular membrane-bounded organelles of eukaryotic cells transiently contact the extracellular environment during endocytosis and secretion. Such contacts must be precisely timed to prevent leakage of car...
Expansion microscopy (ExM) is a recently invented technology that uses swellable charged polymers, synthesized densely and with appropriate topology throughout a preserved biological specimen, to physically ma...
Registered Reports, an article format initiated to help promote transparency and reproducibility in the preclinical and social sciences, are spreading into the biological literature. The format is now offered by
A stereotyped array of body wall muscles enables precision and stereotypy of animal movements. In Drosophila, each syncytial muscle forms via fusion of one founder cell (FC) with multiple fusion competent myoblas...
One of the great revelations of post-genomic biology has been the extent to which essential functions and mechanisms are conserved across vast phylogenetic distances. Because of this, we can look to the fruit ...
Matriptase is a membrane serine protease essential for epithelial development, homeostasis, and regeneration, as well as a central orchestrator of pathogenic pericellular signaling in the context of inflammato...
Intravascular leukocyte recruitment in most vertebrate tissues is restricted to postcapillary and collecting venules, whereas capillaries and arterioles usually support little or no leukocyte adhesion. This se...
Recent developments in droplet-based microfluidics allow the transcriptional profiling of thousands of individual cells in a quantitative, highly parallel and cost-effective way. A critical, often limiting ste...
Senses connect organisms to both the world and to each other, yet there is much we don’t know about them. Using examples drawn primarily from the author’s subfield of vision research, this article discusses fi...
Improvements in imaging technology and the development of powerful machine learning algorithms are revolutionizing the study of animal behavior in the laboratory. These innovations promise to reveal both globa...
Accurate determination of mouse positions from video data is crucial for various types of behavioral analyses. While detection of body positions is straightforward, the correct identification of nose positions...
Endogenous circadian oscillators distributed across the mammalian body are synchronised among themselves and with external time via a variety of signalling molecules, some of which interact with G-protein-coup...
Plant-pathogenic oomycetes are responsible for economically important losses in crops worldwide. Phytophthora palmivora, a tropical relative of the potato late blight pathogen, causes rotting diseases in many tro...
The merging of genomes in inter-specific hybrids can result in novel phenotypes, including increased growth rate and biomass yield, a phenomenon known as heterosis. Heterosis is typically viewed as the opposit...
Biological systems integrate multiscale processes and networks and are, therefore, viewed as difficult to dissect. However, because of the clear-cut separation between the software code (the information encode...
Emerging pathogens of crops threaten food security and are increasingly problematic due to intensive agriculture and high volumes of trade and transport in plants and plant products. The ability to predict pat...
Animal olfactory systems detect volatile environmental chemicals and integrate this information to direct the discovery of food and mates as well as danger avoidance. Rather than remaining constant, olfactory ...
The misfolding of the cellular prion protein (PrPC) causes fatal neurodegenerative diseases. Yet PrPC is highly conserved in mammals, suggesting that it exerts beneficial functions preventing its evolutionary eli...
Stereotypic cleavage patterns play a crucial role in cell fate determination by precisely positioning early embryonic blastomeres. Although misplaced cell divisions can alter blastomere fates and cause embryon...
Fishes are extremely speciose and also highly disparate in their fin configurations, more specifically in the number of fins present as well as their structure, shape, and size. How they achieved this remarkab...
Trimeric intracellular cation (TRIC) channels are crucial for Ca2+ handling in eukaryotes and are involved in K+ uptake in prokaryotes. Recent studies on the representative members of eukaryotic and prokaryotic T...
Exercise exerts remarkably powerful effects on metabolism and health, with anti-disease and anti-aging outcomes. Pharmacological manipulation of exercise benefit circuits might improve the health of the sedent...
Animals exhibit astonishingly complex behaviors. Studying the subtle features of these behaviors requires quantitative, high-throughput, and accurate systems that can cope with the often rich perplexing data.
Most agronomic traits in rice are complex and polygenic. The identification of quantitative trait loci (QTL) for grain length is an important objective of rice genetic research and breeding programs.
Mitochondria of opisthokonts undergo permanent fission and fusion throughout the cell cycle. Here, we investigated the dynamics of the mitosomes, the simplest forms of mitochondria, in the anaerobic protist pa...
All of us have marveled at the remarkable diversity of animal behaviors in nature.
Contamination is a well-known but often neglected problem in molecular biology. Here, we investigated the prevalence of cross-contamination among 446 samples from 116 distinct species of animals, which were pr...
The fate of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) has been inferred indirectly from the activity of ER-localized thiol oxidases and peroxiredoxins, in vitro, and the consequences of their gen...
Salicylic acid (SA) is an important plant hormone that regulates many aspects of plant growth and development, as well as resistance to (a)biotic stress. Efforts to identify SA effector proteins have revealed ...
In addition to messenger RNA (mRNA), noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) are essential components in cellular machineries for translation and splicing. Besides their housekeeping functions, ncRNAs are involved in cell typ...
Defining the transcriptome and the genetic pathways of pancreatic cells is of great interest for elucidating the molecular attributes of pancreas disorders such as diabetes and cancer. As the function of the d...
Plants are exposed to diverse pathogens and pests, yet most plants are resistant to most plant pathogens. Non-host resistance describes the ability of all members of a plant species to successfully prevent col...
The tropics are the repository of much of the world’s biodiversity, yet are undersampled relative to temperate regions. To help fill this knowledge gap, a paper in BMC Biology explores diversity patterns in tropi...
2022 Citation Impact
5.4 - 2-year Impact Factor
7.1 - 5-year Impact Factor
1.461 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
2.324 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)
2023 Speed
10 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
180 days submission to accept (Median)
2023 Usage
2,378,081 downloads
3,761 Altmetric mentions
This journal is participating in a pilot of NISO/STM's Working Group on Peer Review Taxonomy, to identify and standardize definitions and terminology in peer review practices in order to make the peer review process for articles and journals more transparent. Further information on the pilot is available here.
The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:
We welcome your feedback on this Peer Review Taxonomy Pilot. Please can you take the time to complete this short survey.
BMC Biology is recruiting new Editorial Board Members
We are looking for Editorial Board Members in all fields of biology. If you are interested in becoming an EBM please see this page.
Portable peer review
BMC Biology supports portable peer review by sharing reviews and evaluating papers based on existing reports. Learn more here.
BMC Biology is a member of the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium.
