Bateman identified two aspects of sexual selection. The first, called Bateman's principle, is that sexual selection favors increased promiscuity of males but not of females as a result of differences in parental investment in gametes. The second is that the variance in mate number of males is the fundamental cause of a sex difference in fitness variance. We argue that Bateman's insight about th...

Enzyme promiscuity is a concept that in the last years is earning prominence in different fields of enzymology like biocatalysis, enzyme engineering or enzyme evolution. Catalytic promiscuity is defined as the ability of an enzyme to catalyze more than one chemical transformation. Naturally occurring catalytic promiscuity provide the starting point for a Darwinian evolution of enzymes to new fu...

A substantial fraction of eukaryotic proteins contains multiple domains, some of which show a tendency to occur in diverse domain architectures and can be considered mobile (or 'promiscuous'). These promiscuous domains are typically involved in protein-protein interactions and play crucial roles in interaction networks, particularly those contributing to signal transduction. They also play a ma...

Long life is a typical feature of individuals living in cooperative societies. One explanation is that group living lowers mortality, which selects for longer life. Alternatively, long life may make the evolution of cooperation more likely by ensuring a long breeding tenure, making helping behaviour and queuing for breeding positions worthwhile. The benefit of queuing will, however, depend on w...

The ability to interact with different partners is one of the most important features in proteins. Proteins that bind a large number of partners (hubs) have been often associated with intrinsic disorder. However, many examples exist of hubs with an ordered structure, and evidence of a general mechanism promoting promiscuity in ordered proteins is still elusive. An intriguing hypothesis is that ...

The enzymes that facilitate phosphate and sulfate hydrolysis are among the most proficient natural catalysts known to date. Interestingly, a large number of these enzymes are promiscuous catalysts that exhibit both phosphatase and sulfatase activities in the same active site and, on top of that, have also been demonstrated to efficiently catalyze the hydrolysis of other additional substrates wi...

For the generation of contemporary databases of bioactive compounds, activity information is usually extracted from the scientific literature. However, when activity data are analyzed, source publications are typically no longer taken into consideration. Therefore, compound activity data selected from ChEMBL were traced back to thousands of original publications, activity records including comp...