The most effective learning occurs during sensitive periods. Olfactory plasticity to main social olfactory cues is limited to a critical period to a large degree. The objective was to evaluate the influence of early olfactory experience on the behavioral and neuronal responses of males to con- and heterospecific odors of receptive females in two species, M. musculus (subspecies...
Examples of rapid evolution are common in nature but difficult to account for with the standard population genetic model of adaptation. Instead, selection from the standing genetic variation permits rapid adaptation via soft sweeps or polygenic adaptation. Empirical evidence of this process in nature is currently limited but accumulating. We provide genome-wide analyses of rapid...
In recent years, increasing attention has been placed on the development of phylogeny-based statistical methodologies for uncovering site-specific changes in amino acid fitness profiles over time. The few available random-effects approaches, modelling across-site variation in amino acid profiles as random variables drawn from a statistical law, either lack a mechanistic codon...
Gap junctions (GJ) are one of the most common forms of intercellular communication. GJs are assembled from proteins that form channels connecting the cytoplasm of adjacent cells. They are considered to be the main or the only type of intercellular channels and the universal feature of all multicellular animals. Two unrelated protein families are currently considered to be...
Sex-biased gene expression is thought to drive the phenotypic differences in males and females in metazoans. Drosophila has served as a primary model for studying male-female differences in gene expression, and its effects on protein sequence divergence. However, the forces shaping evolution of sex-biased expression remain largely unresolved, including the roles of selection and...
Sex-determining systems may profoundly influence the ecology, behaviour and demography of animals, yet these relationships are poorly understood. Here we investigate whether species with temperature-dependent (TSD) and genetic sex determination (GSD) differ in key demographic traits, using data from 181 species representing all major phylogenetic lineages of extant reptiles. We...
Alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs) are taxonomically pervasive strategies adopted by individuals to maximize reproductive success within populations. Even for conditionally-dependent traits, consensus postulates most ARTs involve both genetic and environmental interactions (GEIs), but to date, quantifying genetic variation underlying the threshold disposing an individual to...
Micro RNAs (miRNAs), a class of small non-coding RNAs, have been implicated in various aspects of plant development. miR394 is required for shoot apical meristem organization, stem cell maintenance and abiotic stress responses in Arabidopsis, where it functions by negatively regulating the transcript level of target LEAF CURLING RESPONSIVENESS (LCR), which is an F-box protein...
Following publication of the original article [1], the authors notified us of an error in the Results section of the Abstract. The original article has been corrected.
DNA barcoding utilises a standardised region of the cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene to identify specimens to the species level. It has proven to be an effective tool for identification of avian samples. The unique island avifauna of New Zealand is taxonomically and evolutionarily distinct. We analysed COI sequence data in order to determine if DNA barcoding could accurately...
Germ lines are the cell lineages that give rise to the sperm and eggs in animals. The germ lines first arise from primordial germ cells (PGCs) during embryogenesis: these form from either a presumed derived mode of preformed germ plasm (inheritance) or from an ancestral mechanism of inductive cell-cell signalling (induction). Numerous genes involved in germ line specification and...
It has been suggested that climate change will lead to increased environmental fluctuations, which will undoubtedly have evolutionary consequences for all biota. For instance, fluctuations can directly increase the risk of invasions of alien species into new areas, as these species have repeatedly been proposed to benefit from disturbances. At the same time increased...
During the modern human expansion, new environmental pressures may have driven adaptation, especially in genes related to the perception of ingested substances and their detoxification. Consequently, positive (adaptive) selection may have occurred in genes related to taste, and in those related to the CYP450 system due to its role in biotransformation of potentially toxic...
Morphological diversity of limb bone lengths, diameters, and proportions in mammals is known to vary strongly with locomotor habit. It remains less well known how different locomotor habits are correlated with cross-sectional traits of the limb skeleton, such as cross-sectional area (CSA), second moments of area (SMA), and section modulus (MOD) and whether these traits have...
Many physiological processes are influenced by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChR), ranging from neuromuscular and parasympathetic signaling to modulation of the reward system and long-term memory. Due to the complexity of the nAChR family and variable evolutionary rates among its members, their evolution in vertebrates has been difficult to resolve. In order to understand...
Establishing the divergence times of groups of organisms is a major goal of evolutionary biology. This is especially challenging for microbial lineages due to the near-absence of preserved physical evidence (diagnostic body fossils or geochemical biomarkers). Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) can serve as a temporal scaffold between microbial groups and other fossil-calibrated...
Among the four bases, guanine is the most susceptible to damage from oxidative stress. Replication of DNA containing damaged guanines results in G to T mutations. Therefore, the mutations resulting from oxidative DNA damage are generally expected to predominantly consist of G to T (and C to A when the damaged guanine is not in the reference strand) and result in decreased GC...
Phenotypic plasticity is a pervasive property of all organisms and considered to be of key importance for dealing with environmental variation. Plastic responses to temperature, which is one of the most important ecological factors, have received much attention over recent decades. A recurrent pattern of temperature-induced adaptive plasticity includes increased heat tolerance...
Caecilians (Gymnophiona) are the least speciose extant lissamphibian order, yet living forms capture approximately 250 million years of evolution since their earliest divergences. This long history is reflected in the broad range of skull morphologies exhibited by this largely fossorial, but developmentally diverse, clade. However, this diversity of form makes quantification of...
The polyamine oxidases (PAOs) catabolize the oxidative deamination of the polyamines (PAs) spermine (Spm) and spermidine (Spd). Most of the phylogenetic studies performed to analyze the plant PAO family took into account only a limited number and/or taxonomic representation of plant PAOs sequences. Here, we constructed a plant PAO protein sequence database and identified four...
ALRs (AIM2-like Receptors) are germline encoded PRRs that belong to PYHIN gene family of cytokines, which are having signature N-terminal PYD (Pyrin, PAAD or DAPIN) domain and C-terminal HIN-200 (hematopoietic, interferon-inducible nuclear protein with 200 amino acid repeat) domain joined by a linker region. The positively charged HIN-200 domain senses and binds with negatively...
The plasminogen (PLG) activation system is composed by a series of serine proteases, inhibitors and several binding proteins, which together control the temporal and spatial generation of the active serine protease plasmin. As this proteolytic system plays a central role in human physiology and pathophysiology it has been extensively studied in mammals. The serine proteases of...
Western house mice Mus musculus domesticus are among the most important mammalian model species for chromosomal speciation. Hybrids between chromosomal races of M. m. domesticus suffer various degrees of fertility reduction between full fertility and complete sterility, depending on the complexity of the chromosomal differences between the races. This complexity presents itself...
An excess of nonsynonymous substitutions, over neutrality, is considered evidence of positive Darwinian selection. Inference for proteins often relies on estimation of the nonsynonymous to synonymous ratio (ω = dN/dS) within a codon model. However, to ease computational difficulties, ω is typically estimated assuming an idealized substitution process where (i) all nonsynonymous...