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R. Galant and SB. Carroll have identified a transcriptional repression domain in the carboxy-terminal region of the Drosophila Ultrabithorax (Ubx) protein that is highly conserved in insects but appears to be absent in other arthropods, suggesting a mechanism by which body morphologies may be regulated...[more]

Biologists, led by William McGinnis, at the University of California, San Diego have uncovered the first genetic evidence that explains how large-scale alterations to body plans were accomplished during the early evolution of animals... [more]

Research shows a specific case of the disadvantage for an organism of a mutation in a gene for a critical component of the DNA damage repair system that is essential for survival of every living organism. The mutation may have conferred some short-term benefit for the strain in which it was found, but was deleterious in the long term...[more]

Ali H. Brivanlou and James E. Darnell Jr. propose a new classification scheme for more than 2000 eukaryotic transcriptional factors that characterizes them based upon the functional role they play in gene expression...[more]

David Krakauer and Joshua Plotkin propose that antiredundancy is as important for developmental robustness as redundancy, and is an essential mechanism for ensuring tissue-level stability in complex multicellular organisms...[more]

Richard Johns provides "a mathematical basis for the plausible idea that regular dynamical laws can only produce (quickly and reliably) regular structures". Thus the actual laws, which are regular, can only produce regular objects, like crystals, and not irregular ones, like living organisms"...[more]

These results illustrate exactly why arthropod compound eye evolution has remained controversial, because one of two seemingly very unlikely evolutionary histories must be true. Either compound eyes with detailed similarities evolved multiple times in different arthropod groups or compound eyes have been lost in a seemingly inordinate number of arthropod lineages... [more].