Deciphering the genetic bases that drive animal diversity is one of the major challenges of modern biology. Although four decades ago it was proposed that animal evolution was mainly driven by changes in cis-regulatory DNA ...

The current paradigm in the field of gene regulation postulates that regulatory information for generating gene expression is organized into modules (enhancers), each containing the information for driving gene expression ...

In this paper, we provide a historical account of the contribution of a single line of research to our current understanding of the structure of cis-regulatory regions and the genetic basis for morphological evolution. We ...

Mutations in regulatory regions including enhancers are an important source of variation and innovation during evolution. Enhancers can evolve by changes in the sequence, arrangement and repertoire of transcription factor ...

Developmental genes can have complex cis-regulatory regions with multiple enhancers. Early work revealed remarkable modularity of enhancers, whereby distinct DNA regions drive gene expression in defined spatiotemporal ...

The electrochemical splitting of water holds promise for the storage of energy produced intermittently by renewable energy sources. The evolution of hydrogen currently relies on the use of platinum as a catalyst—which is ...

Locomotor capacity is often considered an excellent measure of whole animal performance because it requires the integrated functioning of many morphological, physiological (and biochemical) traits. However, because studies ...

The proopiomelanocortin (POMC) gene is expressed in the pituitary and arcuate neurons of the hypothalamus. POMC arcuate neurons play a central role in the control of energy homeostasis, and rare loss-of-function mutations ...

Unique human features such as complex language are the result of molecular evolutionary changes that modified developmental programs of our brain. The human-specific evolution of the forkhead box P2 (FOXP2) gene coding ...