Related papers: Rapid divergence of the ecdysone receptor in Dipte…
The Tribolium genome contains 21 nuclear receptors, representing all of the six known subfamilies. When compared to other species, this first complete set for a Coleoptera reveals a strong conservation of the number and identity of nuclear…
There is much concern about disruption of endocrine physiology regulated by steroid hormones in humans, other terrestrial vertebrates and fish by industrial chemicals, such as bisphenol A, and pesticides, such as DDT. These…
Dmrt1 is pivotal in testis formation and function by interacting with genes crucial for Sertoli cell differentiation. Dmrt1, or Sox9, forms a conserved antagonistic interaction with Foxl2 across mammals. Across 128 vertebrate species, Dmrt1…
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) threaten human health, ecosystems, and biodiversity by interfering with hormonal signaling pathways conserved across vertebrates. Traditional in vivo assays are costly and time-consuming, limiting their…
Sex chromosomes have evolved repeatedly across the Tree of Life, yet their evolutionary fates differ strikingly. In sharp contrast to mammals and birds with degenerated, stable Y/W chromosomes, in most amphibians, teleosts, non avian…
Molecular dynamics simulations were used to determine the binding affinities between between the hormone 17 beta-estradiol (E2) and different estrogen receptor (ER) isoforms in the rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss. Previous phylogenetic…
Considering that life on earth evolved about 3.7 billion years ago, vertebrates are young, appearing in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion about 542 to 515 million years ago. Results from sequence analyses of genomes from…
Despite the greater functional importance of protein levels, our knowledge of gene expression evolution is based almost entirely on studies of mRNA levels. In contrast, our understanding of how translational regulation evolves has lagged…
Thousands of candidate human-specific regulatory sequences (HSRS) have been identified, supporting the hypothesis that unique to human phenotypes result from human-specific alterations of genomic regulatory networks. Here, conservation…
Gaining a genomic perspective on phylogeny requires the collection of data from many putatively independent loci collected across the genome. Among insects, an increasingly common approach to collecting this class of data involves…
Drosophila Y chromosomes are composed entirely of silent heterochromatin, while male X chromosomes have highly accessible chromatin and are hypertranscribed due to dosage compensation. Here, we dissect the molecular mechanisms and…
Understanding the patterns and causes of phenotypic divergence is a central goal in evolutionary biology. Much work has shown that mRNA abundance is highly variable between closely related species. However, the extent and mechanisms of…
A morphogenic protein known as Dorsal patterns the embryonic dorsoventral body axis of Drosophila by binding to transcriptional enhancers across the genome. Each such enhancer activates a neighboring gene at a unique threshold concentration…
The genetic material of a eukaryotic cell comprises both nuclear DNA (ncDNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). These differ markedly in several aspects but nevertheless must encode proteins that are compatible with one another. Here we…
Transposable elements can be categorised into DNA and RNA elements based on their mechanism of transposition. Tyrosine recombinase elements (YREs) are relatively rare and poorly understood, despite sharing characteristics with both DNA and…
A longstanding goal of biology is to identify the key genes and species that critically impact evolution, ecology, and health. Network analysis has revealed keystone species that regulate ecosystems and master regulators that regulate…
Molecular and genetic definitions of human-specific changes to genomic regulatory networks (GRNs) contributing to development of unique to human phenotypes remain a highly significant challenge. Genome-wide proximity placement analysis of…
Atlantic sea lamprey contains two corticoid receptors (CRs), CR1 and CR2, that are identical except for a four amino acid insert (Thr-Arg-Gln-Gly) in the CR1 DNA-binding domain (DBD). Steroids are stronger transcriptional activators of CR2…
Differences in transcriptional regulatory networks underlie much of the phenotypic variation observed across organisms. Changes to cis-regulatory elements are widely believed to be the predominant means by which regulatory networks evolve,…
Turnover of regulatory sequence and function is an important part of molecular evolution. But what are the modes of sequence evolution leading to rapid formation and loss of regulatory sites? Here, we show that a large fraction of…