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A recent paper in BMC Biology reports that actin stress fibers in adjacent cultured endothelial cells are linked through adherens junctions. This organization might provide a super-cellular network that could ena...
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that regulate the expression of numerous target genes. Yet, while hundreds of miRNAs have been identified, little is known about their functions. In a recent report...
An international collaborative effort has recently uncovered the genome of the zebra finch, a songbird model that has provided unique insights into an array of biological phenomena.
Pollen tubes follow attractants secreted by the ovules. In a recent paper in BMC Plant Biology, Stewman and colleagues have quantified the parameters of this attraction and used them to calibrate a mathematical m...
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...
A recent study in BMC Evolutionary Biology has reconstructed the molecular phylogeny of a large Mediterranean cave-dwelling beetle clade, revealing an ancient origin and strong geographic structuring. It seems li...
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...
Two recent studies in BMC Biology and Evolution raise important questions about a textbook case of frequency-dependent selection in scale-eating cichlid fishes. They also suggest a fascinating new line of researc...
A phylogeographic analysis of gene sequences important in determining body size in dogs, recently published in BMC Biology, traces the appearance of small body size to the Neolithic Middle East. This finding stre...
Understanding the spatio-temporal subversion of host cell signaling by bacterial virulence factors is key to combating infectious diseases. Following a recent study by Buntru and co-workers published in BMC Biolo...
A recent study in BMC Evolutionary Biology has shown that genetically similar individual ring-tailed lemurs are also more similar in their scent composition, suggesting a possible mechanism of kin recognition. Th...
There have been notable advances in the scientific understanding of regeneration within the past year alone, including two recently published in BMC Biology. Increasingly, progress in the regeneration field is be...
Acoel and platyhelminth worms are particularly attractive invertebrate models for stem-cell research because their bodies are continually renewed from large pools of somatic stem cells. Several recent studies,...
The TSC-22 domain family (TSC22DF) consists of putative transcription factors harboring a DNA-binding TSC-box and an adjacent leucine zipper at their carboxyl termini. Both short and long TSC22DF isoforms are ...
By combining Drosophila genetics and proteomics Gluderer et al. report in this issue of Journal of Biology the isolation of a novel growth-regulatory complex consisting of Bunched and Madm. Future study of this c...
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a favorite model for the study of aging. A wealth of genetic and genomic studies show that metabolic regulation is a hallmark of life-span modulation. A recent study in BMC ...
A recent global analysis of gene expression during the differentiation of neuronal stem cells to neurons and oligodendrocytes indicates a complex pattern of changes in the expression of both protein-coding tra...
The THO complex is a key component in the co-transcriptional formation of messenger ribonucleoparticles that are competent to be exported from the nucleus, yet its precise function is unknown. A recent study in B...
Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are among the most evolutionarily ancient classes of small RNA. Two experimental screens published in BMC Genomics expand the eukaryotic snoRNA catalog, but many more snoRNAs remain...
How much functional specialization can one component histone confer on a single nucleosome? The histone variant H2A.Z seems to be an extreme example. Genome-wide distribution maps show non-random (and evolutio...
Delineation of the mechanisms that establish and maintain the polarity of epithelial tissues is essential to understanding morphogenesis, tissue specificity and cancer. Three-dimensional culture assays provide...
Daphnia pulex is the first crustacean to have its genome sequenced. Availability of the genome sequence will have implications for research in aquatic ecology and evolution in particular, as addressed by a series...
A major challenge in bacterial pathogenesis is understanding the molecular basis of the switch from saprophytism to virulence. Following a recent whole-genome transcriptomic analysis using tiling arrays, an ar...
A recent paper in BMC Biology reports the first large-scale insertional mutagenesis screen in a non-drosophilid insect, the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum. This screen marks the beginning of a non-biased, '...
The use of cultivation-independent approaches to map microbial diversity, including recent work published in BMC Biology, has now shown that protists, like bacteria/archaea, are much more diverse than had been re...
Although proteins involved in determining apical-basal cell polarity have been directly linked to tumorigenesis, their precise roles in this process remain unclear. A recent report in BMC Biology clarifies the si...
Human monocytes can be divided into subsets according to their expression or lack of the cell-surface antigen CD16. In papers published recently in the Journal of Proteome Research and in BMC Genomics, two groups...
The role of genomic sequence in directing the packaging of eukaryotic genomes into chromatin has been the subject of considerable recent debate. A new paper from Tillo and Hughes shows that the intrinsic therm...
Zebrafish are a powerful system for studying the early embryonic events that form the skull and face, as a model for human craniofacial birth defects such as cleft palate. Signaling pathways that pattern the p...
The regulation of gene expression in trypanosomes is unique. In the absence of transcriptional control at the level of initiation, a subset of Trypanosoma brucei genes form post-transcriptional regulons in which ...
Evolutionary changes in gene expression are a main driver of phenotypic evolution. In yeast, genes that have rapidly diverged in expression are associated with particular promoter features, including the prese...
Bioinformatics-based searches for correlations between subcellular localization and pI or charge distribution of proteins have failed to detect meaningful correlations. Recent work published in BMC Biology finds ...
The complexity of the core promoter transcription machinery has emerged as an additional level of transcription regulation that is used during vertebrate development. Recent studies, including one published in BM...
In addition to progressive CD4+ T cell immune deficiency, HIV infection is characterized by generalized immune activation, thought to arise from increased microbial exposure resulting from diminishing immunity.
Detailed analysis of T cell dynamics in humans is challenging and mouse models can be important tools for characterizing T cell dynamic processes. In a paper just published in Journal of Biology, Marques et al. s...
Expressed sequence tag analyses of the annelid Pomatoceros lamarckii, recently published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, are consistent with less extensive gene loss in the Lophotrochozoa than in the Ecdysozoa, but ...
The concept of checkpoint controls revolutionized our understanding of the cell cycle. Here we revisit the defining features of checkpoints and argue that failure to properly appreciate the concept is leading ...
CYCLOIDEA (CYC)-like TCP genes are critical for flower developmental patterning. Exciting recent breakthroughs, including a study by Song et al. published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, demonstrate that CYC-like ge...
The anaphase-promoting complex (APC) is a ubiquitin-protein ligase required for the completion of mitosis in all eukaryotes. Recent mechanistic studies reveal how this remarkable enzyme combines specificity in...
As the tumor vasculature is a key element of the tumor stroma, angiogenesis is the target of many cancer therapies. Recent work published in BMC Cell Biology describes a fusion protein that combines a peptide pre...
Transposable elements (TEs) have contributed a wide range of functional sequences to their host genomes. A recent paper in BMC Molecular Biology discusses the creation of new transcripts by transposable element i...
Signaling complexes typically consist of highly dynamic molecular ensembles that are challenging to study and to describe accurately. Conventional mechanical descriptions misrepresent this reality and can be a...
Both selective and random processes can affect the outcome of natural hybridization. A recent analysis in BMC Evolutionary Biology of natural hybridization between an introduced and a native salamander reveals th...