Related papers: Steroid Receptors and Vertebrate Evolution
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…
Organisms are frequently exposed to challenges during development, such as poor weather and food shortage. Such challenges can initiate the hormonal stress response, which involves secretion of glucocorticoids. Although the hormonal stress…
Hormonal processes along with enzymatic processing similar to that found in vertebrates occur in annelids. Amino acid sequence determination of annelids precursor gene products reveals the presence of the respective peptides that exhibit…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
Asteroids and comets are remnants from the era of Solar System formation over 4.5 billion years ago, and therefore allow us to address two fundamental questions in astronomy: what was the nature of our protoplanetary disk, and how did the…
Echinoderms take many forms of symmetry. Pentameral symmetry is the major form and the other forms are derived from it. However, the ancestors of echinoderms, which originated from Cambrian period, were believed to be bilaterians.…
The oldest forms of living organisms on Earth are about 3.5 billion years old, and they are found in hydrothermal deposits, and it is often hypothesized that life originated there. But the hydrothermal systems with a fairly strong flow of…
The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…
Five distinct full-length mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) genes have been identified in humans. These human MRs can be distinguished by the presence or absence of an in-frame insertion of 12 base pairs coding for Lys, Cys, Ser, Trp (KCSW)…
Segmentation in arthropod embryogenesis represents a well-known example of body plan diversity. Striped patterns of gene expression that lead to the future body segments appear simultaneously or sequentially in long and short germ-band…
The mechanisms underlying lifespan evolution in organisms have long been mysterious. However, recent studies have demonstrated that organisms evolutionarily gain noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) that carry endogenous profound functions in higher…
Many questions that we have about the history and dynamics of organisms have a geographical component: How many are there, and where do they live? How do they move and interbreed across the landscape? How were they moving a thousand years…
Development from egg to embryo to adult is a fascinating instance of biological self-organization for which genetics has supplied us with a parts list. It remains to find the principles organizing the assembly of those parts. In the last…
The evolution of the Solar System can be schematically divided into three different phases: the Solar Nebula, the Primordial Solar System and the Modern Solar System. These three periods were characterized by very different conditions, both…
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…
Sex chromosomes have independently evolved in species with separate sexes in most lineages across the tree of life. However, the well-accepted canonical model of sex chromosome evolution is not universally supported. There is no single…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
I revisit two theories of cell differentiation in multicellular organisms published a half-century ago, Stuart Kauffman's global gene regulatory dynamics (GGRD) model and Roy Britten's and Eric Davidson's modular gene regulatory network…
Proper vertebrae formation relies on a tissue-wide oscillator called the segmentation clock. Individual cellular oscillators in the presomitic mesoderm are modulated by intercellular coupling and external signals, leading to the propagation…
Metabolic energy consumption has long been thought to play a major role in the aging process ({\it 1}). Across species, a gram of tissue on average expends about the same amount of energy during life-span ({\it 2}). Energy restriction has…