Insects Evolved Radically Different Strategy to Smell

The rapid evolution of the tuatara

siemens submitted, created time 9 months 1 week (www.nature.com)

In a paper published this month in Trends in Genetics 1, the researchers show that the rate of molecular evolution in the reptile is among the fastest yet observed for any vertebrate.But the results contradict the theory that cold-blooded animals with slow metabolisms evolve more slowly than their warm-blooded counterparts.
Without question, there is much to learn about the rates of evolution from such studies.

6 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: molecular evolution living fossils tuatara evolutionary biology speciation herpetology evolution warm-blooded animals reptiles cold-blooded animals

Metabolic rate does not calibrate the molecular clock

biosunny submitted, created time 1 year 3 months (www.pnas.org)

Rates of molecular evolution vary widely among lineages, but the causes of this variation remain poorly understood. It has been suggested that mass-specific metabolic rate may be one of the key factors determining the rate of molecular evolution, and that it can be used to derive "corrected" molecular clocks. However, previous studies have been hampered by a paucity of mass-specific metabolic rate data and have been largely limited to vertebrate taxa

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Molecular Evolution of Drosophila Odorant Receptor Genes

julie submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (mbe.oxfordjournals.org)

"A total of 752 odorant receptor (Or) genes, including pseudogenes, were identified in 11 Drosophila species and named after their orthologs in Drosophila melanogaster. The 813 Or genes, including 61 from D. melanogaster, were classified into 59 orthologous groups that are well supported by gene phylogeny. By reconciling with the gene family phylogeny, we estimated the number of gene duplication/loss events and intron gain/loss events in the species phylogeny. We found that these events are particularly frequent in Drosophila grimshawi, Drosophila willistoni, and obscura group

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Functional Divergence in the Arabidopsis ß-1,3-Glucanase Gene Family Inferred by Phylogenetic Reconstruction of Expression States

julie submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (mbe.oxfordjournals.org)

"The associated expression state is widely distributed in the phylogeny, is retained by over 25% of gene family members, and is consistent with the known functions of ß-1,3-Gs in distantly related species and gene families

Submit comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: ß-1,3-glucanase molecular evolution expression analysis functional divergence pathogenesis-related proteins

Phylemon: a suite of web tools for molecular evolution, phylogenetics and phylogenomics

channel submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (nar.oxfordjournals.org)

The Phylemon web server is available at http://phylemon.bioinfo.cipf.es. Phylemon is an online platform for phylogenetic and evolutionary analyses of molecular sequence data. It has been developed as a web server that integrates a suite of different tools selected among the most popular stand-alone programs in phylogenetic and evolutionary analysis. It has been conceived as a natural response to the increasing demand of data analysis of many experimental scientists wishing to add a molecular evolution and phylogenetics insight into their research.

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More genes underwent positive selection in chimpanzee evolution than in human evolution

addict submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.pnas.org)

"Observations of numerous dramatic and presumably adaptive phenotypic modifications during human evolution prompt the common belief that more genes have undergone positive Darwinian selection in the human lineage than in the chimpanzee lineage since their evolutionary divergence 6-7 million years ago. Here, we test this hypothesis by analyzing nearly 14,000 genes of humans and chimps

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