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Membrane-bound organelles are a defining feature of eukaryotic cells, and play a central role in most of their fundamental processes. The Rab G proteins are the single largest family of proteins that participa...
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2010 8:60
Gut microbes influence animal health and thus, are potential targets for interventions that slow aging. Live E. coli provides the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans with vital micronutrients, such as folates th...
In a paper in BMC Biology Virk et al. show that Caenorhabditis elegans lifespan is extended in response to a diet of folate-deficient Escherichia coli. The deficiencies in folate biosynthesis were due to an aroD ...
The morphological peculiarities of turtles have, for a long time, impeded their accurate placement in the phylogeny of amniotes. Molecular data used to address this major evolutionary question have so far been...
The position of turtles among amniotes remains in dispute, with morphological and molecular comparisons giving different results. Morphological analyses align turtles with either lizards and their relatives, o...
B cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2) proteins are the central regulators of apoptosis. The two bcl-2 genes in Drosophila modulate the response to stress-induced cell death, but not developmental cell death. Because null mut...
The family of lysosome-associated membrane proteins (LAMP) comprises the multifunctional, ubiquitous LAMP-1 and LAMP-2, and the cell type-specific proteins DC-LAMP (LAMP-3), BAD-LAMP (UNC-46, C20orf103) and ma...
Phosphorylation is the predominant language of cell signaling. And, as with any common language, an abundance of dialects has evolved to convey complex information. We discuss here how biosensors are being use...
Body size is intimately related to the physiology and ecology of an organism. Therefore, accurate and consistent body mass estimates are essential for inferring numerous aspects of paleobiology in extinct taxa...
Although RNA interference (RNAi) is known to play an important part in defense against viruses of invertebrates, its contribution to mammalian anti-viral defense has been a matter of dispute. This is surprisin...
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a major model organism in laboratory biology. Very little is known, however, about its ecology, including where it proliferates. In the past, C. elegans was mainly isolated ...
Caenorhabditis elegans is a preeminent model organism, but the natural ecology of this nematode has been elusive. A four-year survey of French orchards published in BMC Biology reveals thriving populations of C. ...
Insects respond to the spatial and temporal dynamics of a pheromone plume, which implies not only a strong response to 'odor on', but also to 'odor off'. This requires mechanisms geared toward a fast signal te...
Organisms use highly accurate molecular processes to transcribe their genes and a variety of mRNA quality control and ribosome proofreading mechanisms to maintain intact the fidelity of genetic information flo...
In a recent BMC Evolutionary Biology article, Huiquan Liu and colleagues report two new genomes of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) viruses from fungi and use these as a springboard to perform an extensive phylogenomi...
Replicate adaptive radiations occur when lineages repeatedly radiate and fill new but similar niches and converge phenotypically. While this is commonly seen in traditional island systems, it may also be prese...
Repeated adaptive radiations are evident when phenotypic divergence occurs within lineages, but this divergence into different forms is convergent when compared across lineages. Classic examples of such repeat...
The olive fruit fly, Bactrocera oleae, is the major arthropod pest of commercial olive production, causing extensive damage to olive crops worldwide. Current control techniques rely on spraying of chemical insect...
In the ubiquitin-proteasome system, a subset of ubiquitylated proteins requires the AAA+ ATPase p97 (also known as VCP or Cdc48) for extraction from membranes or protein complexes before delivery to the protea...
This article is a response to Vibranovski et al.
Meiotic sex chromosome inactivation (MSCI) during spermatogenesis has been proposed as one of the evolutionary driving forces behind both the under-representation of male-biased genes on, and the gene movement...
Microsporidia is one of the taxa that have experienced the most dramatic taxonomic reclassifications. Once thought to be among the earliest diverging eukaryotes, the fungal nature of this group of intracellula...
Body coloration is an ecologically important trait that is often involved in prey-predator interactions through mimicry and crypsis. Although this subject has attracted the interest of biologists and the gener...
The retina of craniates/vertebrates has been proposed to derive from a photoreceptor prosencephalic territory in ancestral chordates, but the evolutionary origin of the different cell types making the retina i...
During a viral infection, the intracellular RIG-I-like receptors (RLRs) sense viral RNA and signal through the mitochondrial antiviral signaling adaptor MAVS (also known as IPS-1, Cardif and VISA) whose activa...
H3N2 influenza A viruses have been widely circulating in human populations since the pandemic of 1968. A striking feature of the evolutionary development of this strain has been its 'canalized' nature, with na...
The Deepwater Horizon disaster was the largest marine oil spill in history, and total vertical exposure of oil to the water column suggests it could impact an enormous diversity of ecosystems. The most vulnera...
Bioluminescent and fluorescent proteins are now used as tools for research in all organisms. There has been massive progress over the past 15 years in creating a palette of fluorescent proteins with a wide spe...
Since its emergence in 1968, influenza A (H3N2) has evolved extensively in genotype and antigenic phenotype. However, despite strong pressure to evolve away from human immunity and to diversify in antigenic ph...
Efficient osteogenic differentiation is highly dependent on coordinated signals arising from growth factor signalling and mechanical forces. Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) are secreted proteins that trigge...
The proteins from the UBA-UBX family interact with ubiquitylated proteins via their UBA domain and with p97 via their UBX domain, thereby acting as substrate-binding adaptors for the p97 ATPase. In particular,...
The evolution of plastids from cyanobacteria is believed to represent a singularity in the history of life. The enigmatic amoeba Paulinella and its 'recently' acquired photosynthetic inclusions provide a fascinat...
Clamp loaders are pentameric ATPases of the AAA+ family that operate to ensure processive DNA replication. They do so by loading onto DNA the ring-shaped sliding clamps that tether the polymerase to the DNA. S...
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2011 9:24
This article is a response to Wang and Luo.
This article is a response to Wang and Luo.
This paper is a response to Pecinka A, Fang W, Rehmsmeier M, Levy AA, Mittelsten Scheid, O: Polyploidization increases meiotic recombination frequency in Arabidopsis. BMC Biology 2011, 9:24.
There is overwhelming evidence that in vitro three-dimensional tumor cell cultures more accurately reflect the complex in vivo microenvironment than simple two-dimensional cell monolayers, not least with respect ...
Molecular oxygen (O2) is one of the key metabolites of all obligate and facultative aerobic pro- and eukaryotes. It plays a fundamental role in energy homeostasis whereas oxygen deprivation, in turn, broadly affe...
Due to their membrane location, G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are subject to regulation by soluble and integral membrane proteins as well as membrane components, including lipids and sterols. GPCRs also ...
Glutamate and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) transporters play important roles in balancing excitatory and inhibitory signals in the brain. Increasing evidence suggest that they may act concertedly to regulate ext...
Ubiquitin-dependent regulation of endocytosis plays an important part in the control of signal transduction, and a critical issue in the understanding of signal transduction therefore relates to regulation of ...
Ubiquitin signaling pathways rely on E3 ligases for effecting the final transfer of ubiquitin from E2 ubiquitin conjugating enzymes to a protein target. Here we re-evaluate the hybrid RING/HECT mechanism used ...
Ubiquitination now ranks with phosphorylation as one of the best-studied post-translational modifications of proteins with broad regulatory roles across all of biology. Ubiquitination usually involves the addi...
Ring species, in which two different forms coexist in one region while being connected by a long chain of interbreeding populations encircling a geographic barrier, provide clear demonstrations of the evolutio...
In the mid 20th century, Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky championed the significance of circular overlaps or ring species as the perfect demonstration of speciation, yet in the over 50 years since, only a ha...
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