The existence of large amounts of within-species genome content variability is puzzling.
Population genetics tells us that fitness effects of new variants—either deleterious, neutral or …

Chloroplasts arose from cyanobacteria, mitochondria arose from proteobacteria. Both
organelles have conserved their prokaryotic biochemistry, but their genomes are reduced, and …

The mechanisms that underlie the origin of major prokaryotic groups are poorly understood.
In principle, the origin of both species and higher taxa among prokaryotes should entail …

Networks allow the investigation of evolutionary relationships that do not fit a tree model.
They are becoming a leading tool for describing the evolutionary relationships between …

The origin of the eukaryotic cell, which is known as eukaryogenesis, has puzzled scientists
for more than 100 years, and many hypotheses have been proposed. Recent analyses of …

Heterogeneity among life traits in mammals has resulted in considerable phylogenetic conflict,
particularly concerning the position of the placental root. Layered upon this are gene- and …

During the late 1980s, the molecular biology community became aware that the words ‘homology’and
‘similarity’were being used in much of the scientific literature as though they were …

The extent to which prokaryotic evolution has been influenced by horizontal gene transfer (HGT)
and therefore might be more of a network than a tree is unclear. Here we use supertree …

Polar bears are uniquely adapted to life in the High Arctic and have undergone drastic
physiological changes in response to Arctic climates and a hyperlipid diet of primarily marine …

The program General Codon Usage Analysis (GCUA) has been developed for analysing
codon and amino acid usage patterns. AVAILABILITY: ftp://ftp.nhm.ac.uk/pub/gcua. Freely …