Individual olfactory-driven behaviors, odor preferences, and olfactory sensitivity have rapidly evolved in blind Mexican cavefish, as a quantitative genetic trait.
Rafael F Guerrero, Tandin Dorji ... C Brandon Ogbunugafor
Inspired by notions of 'druggability' from medicinal chemistry, two new metrics, drug applicability and variant vulnerability, utilize evolutionary perspectives and methods to improve attempts to treat infectious diseases.
Stramenopiles are unusual, because the pay-off phase of glycolysis occurs in mitochondria rather than the cytosol and the identified mitochondrial carrier links the two parts by transporting glycolytic intermediates.
Brian PH Metzger, Yeonwoo Park ... Joseph W Thornton
A complete mutational scan of a protein-DNA interface shows that pairwise epistatic interactions among amino acids determine a transcription factor's specificity for DNA and facilitate the evolution of new functions.
Disruption of the Clock gene in the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis revealed its essential role in circadian rhythm maintenance and uncovered a compensatory light-response pathway, advancing our comprehension of circadian regulation in non-bilaterian animals.
Ryan T Bell, Harutyun Sahakyan ... Eugene V Koonin
Bacterial Type IV restriction-modification systems display remarkable, previously unnoticed diversity of complex gene and domain architectures, and are predicted to couple antiphage immunity with the abortive infection form of defense.
Daniel Thiel, Luis Alfonso Yañez Guerra ... Gáspár Jékely
The identification of 31 neuropeptide GPCRs in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis provides a rich resource to study peptidergic signaling in cnidarians and suggests that cnidarian and bilaterian peptidergic systems diversified independent from each other from a few ancestral systems.
