Related papers: Clusters of microRNAs emerge by new hairpins in ex…
Background: The evolution of microRNA regulation in metazoans is a mysterious process: MicroRNA sequences are highly conserved among distal organisms, but on the other hand, there is no evident conservation of their targets. Results: We…
Transcription is a fundamental cellular process, and the first step of gene expression. In human cells, it depends on the binding to chromatin of various proteins, including RNA polymerases and numerous transcription factors (TFs).…
The expression levels of many thousands of genes can be measured simultaneously by DNA microarrays (chips). This novel experimental tool has revolutionized research in molecular biology and generated considerable excitement. A typical…
Most animals have separate sexes. The differential expression of gene products, in particular that of gene regulators, is underlying sexual dimorphism. Analyses of sex-biased expression have focused mostly in protein coding genes. Several…
Clusters of genes that have evolved by repeated segmental duplication present difficult challenges throughout genomic analysis, from sequence assembly to functional analysis. Improved understanding of these clusters is of utmost importance,…
RNA virus populations will undergo processes of mutation and selection resulting in a mixed population of viral particles. High throughput sequencing of a viral population subsequently contains a mixed signal of the underlying clones. We…
Clusters appear in nature in a diversity of contexts, involving distances as long as the cosmological ones, and down to atoms and molecules and the very small nuclear size. They also appear in several other scenarios, in particular in…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
How multicellular life forms evolved out from unicellular ones constitutes a major problem in our understanding of the evolution of our biosphere. A recent set of experiments involving yeast cell populations has shown that selection for…
The origins of new genes are among the most fundamental questions in evolutionary biology. Our understanding of the ways that new genetic material appears and how that genetic material shapes population variation remains incomplete. De novo…
Recently, microRNAs (miRNAs) have emerged as central posttranscriptional regulators of gene expression. miRNAs regulate many key biological processes, including cell growth, death, development and differentiation. This discovery is…
Genetic robustness, the preservation of an optimal phenotype in the face of mutations, is critical to the understanding of evolution as phenotypically expressed genetic variation is the fuel of natural selection. The origin of genetic…
MicroRNAs play important roles in many biological processes. Their aberrant expression can have oncogenic or tumor suppressor function directly participating to carcinogenesis, malignant transformation, invasiveness and metastasis. Indeed,…
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are non-coding RNAs with approximately 22 nucleotides (nt) that are derived from precursor molecules. These precursor molecules or pre-miRNAs often fold into stem-loop hairpin structures. However, a large number of…
Over the past few years, microRNAs (miRNAs) have emerged as a new prominent class of gene regulatory factors that negatively regulate expression of approximately one-third of the genes in animal genomes at post-transcriptional level.…
It has recently been proposed that proteins embedded in lipidic bio-membranes can spontaneously self-organize into stable small clusters, or membrane nano-domains, due to the competition between short-range attractive and longer-range…
Observations have revealed that most stars are born in clusters. These systems, containing from tens to thousands of stars and typically significant mass in gas in the youngest systems, evolve due to a combination of stellar and star-gas…
A novel group of small non-coding RNA, known as microRNA (miRNA) is predicted to regulate as high as 90% of the coding genes in human. The diversity and abundance of miRNA targets offer an enormous level of combinatorial possibilities and…
Open and globular star clusters have served as benchmarks for the study of stellar evolution due to their supposed nature as simple stellar populations of the same age and metallicity. After a brief review of some of the pioneering work…
The precise layout of gene expression patterns is a crucial step in development. Formation of a sharp boundary between high and low expression domains requires a genetic mechanism which is both sensitive and robust to fluctuations, a demand…