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Review
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...
Biology Direct 2017 12:19
Published on: 14 August 2017
Research
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...
Biology Direct 2017 12:18
Published on: 11 August 2017
Research
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....
Biology Direct 2017 12:17
Published on: 1 August 2017
Research
During the generation and evolution of the eukaryotic cell, a proteobacterial endosymbiont was re-fashioned into the mitochondrion, an organelle that appears to have been present in the ancestor of all present...
Biology Direct 2017 12:16
Published on: 24 July 2017
Discovery Notes
Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) play a key role in normal tissue differentiation and cancer development through their tissue-specific expression in the human transcriptome. Recent investigations of macromolecula...
Biology Direct 2017 12:15
Published on: 8 June 2017
Research
A basic tenet of protein science is that all information about the spatial structure of proteins is present in their sequences. Nonetheless, many proteins fail to attain native structure upon experimental dena...
Biology Direct 2017 12:14
Published on: 31 May 2017
Discovery notes
We report a comprehensive computational dissection of the domain architecture of the SAMD9 family proteins that are involved in antivirus and antitumor response in humans. We show that the SAMD9 protein family...
Biology Direct 2017 12:13
Published on: 25 May 2017
Discovery notes
The protein Gcn1 (General control non-derepressible 1) is found in virtually all eukaryotes, and is a key component of the general amino acid control signal transduction pathway. This pathway is best known for...
Biology Direct 2017 12:12
Published on: 19 May 2017
Hypothesis
Symmetry is an eye-catching feature of animal body plans, yet its causes are not well enough understood. The evolution of animal form is mainly due to changes in gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Based on theor...
Biology Direct 2017 12:11
Published on: 17 May 2017
Research
Rhododendron chrysanthum Pall., an endangered species with significant ornamental and medicinal value, is endemic to the Changbai Mountain of China and can also serve as a significant ...
Biology Direct 2017 12:10
Published on: 3 May 2017
Research
TRIF is a key protein in antiviral innate immunity, operating downstream of TLRs. TRIF activation leads to the production of interferon-β and pro-inflammatory cytokines. There is evidence from experiments to s...
Biology Direct 2017 12:9
Published on: 20 April 2017
Research
The transition between epithelial and mesenchymal phenotypes (EMT) occurs in a variety of contexts. It is critical for mammalian development and it is also involved in tumor initiation and progression. Master ...
Biology Direct 2017 12:8
Published on: 17 April 2017
OPINION
Wright’s metaphor of the fitness landscape has shaped and conditioned our view of the adaptation of populations for almost a century. Since its inception, and including criticism raised by Wright himself, the ...
Biology Direct 2017 12:7
Published on: 28 February 2017
Review
Mutations in the gene encoding for the E3 ubiquitin ligase Parkin are associated to a rare form of familiar autosomal recessive Parkinsonism. Despite decades of research on the Parkin protein, whose structure ...
Biology Direct 2017 12:6
Published on: 21 February 2017
Review
Complementarity between nucleic acid molecules is central to biological information transfer processes. Apart from the basal processes of replication, transcription and translation, complementarity is also emp...
Biology Direct 2017 12:5
Published on: 10 February 2017
Research
Recent developments of high throughput sequencing technologies allow the characterization of the microbial communities inhabiting our world. Various metagenomic studies have suggested using microbial taxa as p...
Biology Direct 2017 12:4
Published on: 31 January 2017
Review
The past decade has seen dramatic progress in our understanding of membrane contact sites (MCS). Important examples of these are endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-mitochondria contact sites. ER-mitochondria contacts ...
Biology Direct 2017 12:3
Published on: 25 January 2017
Research
Molecular phenomena driving pathological aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases are not completely understood yet. Peculiar is the case of Spinocerebellar Ataxia 3 (SCA3) where the conformational properties...
Biology Direct 2017 12:2
Published on: 19 January 2017
Research
Sites of positive selection are identified by comparing observed evolutionary patterns to those expected under a null model for evolution in the absence of such selection. For protein-coding genes, the most co...
Biology Direct 2017 12:1
Published on: 17 January 2017
Research
Acanthamoebidae is a “family” level amoebozoan group composed of the genera Acanthamoeba, Protacanthamoeba, and very recently Luapeleamoeba. This clade of amoebozoans has received considerable attention from the ...
Biology Direct 2016 11:69
Published on: 28 December 2016
Research
It is interesting to study the consistency of outcomes arising from two genomic platforms: Microarray and RNAseq, which are established on fundamentally different technologies. This topic has been frequently d...
Biology Direct 2016 11:67
Published on: 20 December 2016
Research
Kidney renal clear cell carcinoma (KIRC) is a type of cancer that is resistant to chemotherapy and radiotherapy and has limited treatment possibilities. Large-scale molecular profiling of KIRC tumors offers a ...
Biology Direct 2016 11:68
Published on: 20 December 2016
Research
The MAQC/SEQC consortium has recently compiled a key benchmark that can serve for testing the latest developments in analysis tools for microarray and RNA-seq expression profiling. Such objective benchmarks ar...
Biology Direct 2016 11:66
Published on: 20 December 2016
Research
It is believed that all cancers occur due to the mutation or change in one or more genes. In order to investigate the significance of the biological pathways which are interrupted by these genetic mutations, w...
Biology Direct 2016 11:65
Published on: 20 December 2016
Hypothesis
The set of forces and sequence of events that govern the transition from an unfolded polypeptide chain to a functional protein with correct spatial structure remain incompletely known, despite the importance o...
Biology Direct 2016 11:64
Published on: 1 December 2016
