Inevitability of the emergence and persistence of genetic parasites caused by evolutionary instability of parasite-free states
Genetic parasites, including viruses and mobile genetic elements, are ubiquitous among cellular life forms, and moreover, are the most abundant biological entities on earth that harbor the bulk of the genetic ... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - December 4, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Eugene V. Koonin, Yuri I. Wolf and Mikhail I. Katsnelson Tags: Opinion Source Type: research
Domestication of self-splicing introns during eukaryogenesis: the rise of the complex spliceosomal machinery
The spliceosome is a eukaryote-specific complex that is essential for the removal of introns from pre-mRNA. It consists of five small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs) and over a hundred proteins, making it one of the mos... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - December 1, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Julian Vosseberg and Berend Snel Tags: Review Source Type: research
COGcollator: a web server for analysis of distant relationships between homologous protein families
The Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COGs) of proteins systematize evolutionary related proteins into specific groups with similar functions. However, the available databases do not provide means to assess the ... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - November 29, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Daria V. Dibrova, Kirill A. Konovalov, Vadim V. Perekhvatov, Konstantin V. Skulachev and Armen Y. Mulkidjanian Tags: Application note Source Type: research
Sugar Lego: gene composition of bacterial carbohydrate metabolism genomic loci
Bacterial carbohydrate metabolism is extremely diverse, since carbohydrates serve as a major energy source and are involved in a variety of cellular processes. Bacterial genes belonging to same metabolic pathw... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - November 25, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Anna Kaznadzey, Pavel Shelyakin and Mikhail S. Gelfand Tags: Research Source Type: research
Over-expression of miR-146b and its regulatory role in intestinal epithelial cell viability, proliferation, and apoptosis in piglets
In this study, we evaluated the effects of miR-146b on cell viability, proliferation,... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - November 25, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Xin Tao, Shujie Liu, Xiaoming Men and Ziwei Xu Tags: Research Source Type: research
COGNAT: a web server for comparative analysis of genomic neighborhoods
In prokaryotic genomes, functionally coupled genes can be organized in conserved gene clusters enabling their coordinated regulation. Such clusters could contain one or several operons, which are groups of co-... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - November 22, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Olesya I. Klimchuk, Kirill A. Konovalov, Vadim V. Perekhvatov, Konstantin V. Skulachev, Daria V. Dibrova and Armen Y. Mulkidjanian Tags: Application note Source Type: research
Cellular origin of the viral capsid-like bacterial microcompartments
Bacterial microcompartments (BMC) are proteinaceous organelles that structurally resemble viral capsids, but encapsulate enzymes that perform various specialized biochemical reactions in the cell cytoplasm. Th... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - November 13, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Mart Krupovic and Eugene V. Koonin Tags: Discovery notes Source Type: research
ASXL gain-of-function truncation mutants: defective and dysregulated forms of a natural ribosomal frameshifting product?
Programmed ribosomal frameshifting (PRF) is a gene expression mechanism which enables the translation of two N-terminally coincident, C-terminally distinct protein products from a single mRNA. Many viruses uti... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - October 16, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Adam M. Dinan, John F. Atkins and Andrew E. Firth Tags: Research Source Type: research
Why we don ’t want another “Synthesis”
High-level debates in evolutionary biology often treat the Modern Synthesis as a framework of population genetics, or as an intellectual lineage with a changing distribution of beliefs. Unfortunately, these fl... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - October 2, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Arlin Stoltzfus Tags: Opinion Source Type: research
Differential signal sensitivities can contribute to the stability of multispecies bacterial communities
Bacterial species present in multispecies microbial communities often react to the same chemical signal but at vastly different concentrations. The existence of different response thresholds with respect to th... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - September 15, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: J ános Juhász, Dóra Bihary, Attila Jády, Sándor Pongor and Balázs Ligeti Tags: Research Source Type: research
Evidence-based gene models for structural and functional annotations of the oil palm genome
Oil palm is an important source of edible oil. The importance of the crop, as well as its long breeding cycle (10-12 years) has led to the sequencing of its genome in 2013 to pave the way for genomics-guided b... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - September 8, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Kuang-Lim Chan, Tatiana V. Tatarinova, Rozana Rosli, Nadzirah Amiruddin, Norazah Azizi, Mohd Amin Ab Halim, Nik Shazana Nik Mohd Sanusi, Nagappan Jayanthi, Petr Ponomarenko, Martin Triska, Victor Solovyev, Mohd Firdaus-Raih, Ravigadevi Sambanthamurthi, De Tags: Research Source Type: research
On the global CRISPR array behavior in class I systems
Much effort is underway to build and upgrade databases and tools related to occurrence, diversity, and characterization of CRISPR-Cas systems. As microbial communities and their genome complements are unearthe... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - August 29, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Alice Toms and Rodolphe Barrangou Tags: Research Source Type: research
Breath-giving cooperation: critical review of origin of mitochondria hypotheses
The origin of mitochondria is a unique and hard evolutionary problem, embedded within the origin of eukaryotes. The puzzle is challenging due to the egalitarian nature of the transition where lower-level units... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - August 14, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Istv án Zachar and Eörs Szathmáry Tags: Review Source Type: research
Cell adhesion heterogeneity reinforces tumour cell dissemination: novel insights from a mathematical model
Cancer cell invasion, dissemination, and metastasis have been linked to an epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of individual tumour cells. During EMT, adhesion molecules like E-cadherin are downregulated a... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - August 11, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: David Reher, Barbara Klink, Andreas Deutsch and Anja Voss-B öhme Tags: Research Source Type: research
EMQIT: a machine learning approach for energy based PWM matrix quality improvement
Transcription factor binding affinities to DNA play a key role for the gene regulation. Learning the specificity of the mechanisms of binding TFs to DNA is important both to experimentalists and theoreticians.... (Source: Biology Direct)
Source: Biology Direct - August 1, 2017 Category: Biology Authors: Karolina Smolinska and Marcin Pacholczyk Tags: Research Source Type: research
