The human cerebral cortex controls complex cognitive behaviors. During mammalian evolution, the number of neurons increased in many lineages, requiring a larger cortical surface area to fit into a skull that did not scale proportionally. This space problem was solved by cortical folding, resulting in gyrencephalic (folded) brains. While several hypotheses have been proposed to explain cortical ...

Primary immune responses generate short-term effectors and long-term protective memory cells. The delineation of the genealogy linking naive, effector, and memory cells has been complicated by the lack of phenotypes discriminating effector from memory differentiation stages. Using transcriptomics and phenotypic analyses, we identify Bcl2 and Mki67 as a marker combination that enables the tracki...

Crustaceans are a diverse and ancient group of arthropods that have long been studied as interesting model systems in biology, especially for understanding animal evolution and physiology and for environmentally relevant studies. Like many model systems, advances in DNA-sequencing methodologies have led to a large amount of genomics-related projects. The purpose of this article is to highlight ...

* The transcriptome of an organism is its set of gene transcripts (mRNAs) at a defined spatial and temporal locus. Because gene expression is affected markedly by environmental and developmental perturbations, it is widely assumed that transcriptome divergence among taxa represents adaptive phenotypic selection. This assumption has been challenged by neutral theories which propose that stochast...

The innovation of the eukaryote cytoskeleton enabled phagocytosis, intracellular transport, and cytokinesis, and is largely responsible for the diversity of morphologies among eukaryotes. Still, the relationship between phenotypic innovations in the cytoskeleton and their underlying genotype is poorly understood. To explore the genetic mechanism of morphological evolution of the eukaryotic cyto...

Next-generation sequencing technology is rapidly transforming the landscape of evolutionary biology, and has become a cost-effective and efficient means of collecting exome information for non-model organisms. Due to their taxonomic diversity, production of interesting venom and silk proteins, and the relative scarcity of existing genomic resources, spiders in particular are excellent targets f...

Stomatopod crustaceans have complex visual systems containing up to 16 different spectral classes of photoreceptors, more than described for any other animal. A previous molecular study of this visual system focusing on the expression of opsin genes found many more transcripts than predicted on the basis of physiology, but was unable to fully document the expressed opsin genes responsible for t...

Interest in bivalve genomics has emerged during the last decade, owing to the importance of these organisms in aquaculture and fisheries and to their role in marine environmental science. Knowledge of bivalve genome structure, function and evolution resulting from 20th century “single gene” approaches is limited, but genomic technologies are called to dramatically increase it. Research based on...

Acanthamoeba are infected by a remarkable diversity of large dsDNA viruses, the infectious cycles of which have been characterized using genomics, transcriptomics and electron microscopy. Given their gene content and the persistence of the host nucleus throughout their infectious cycle, the Marseilleviridae were initially assumed to fully replicate in the cytoplasm. Unexpectedly, we find that t...

In order to keep subscribers up-to-date with the latest developments in their field, this current awareness service is provided by John Wiley & Sons and contains newly-published material on comparative and functional genomics. Each bibliography is divided into 16 sections. 1 Reviews & symposia; 2 General; 3 Large-scale sequencing and mapping; 4 Genome evolution; 5 Comparative genomics; 6 Gene f...