Genetic variation, which is generated by mutation, recombination and gene flow, can reduce
the mean fitness of a population, both now and in the future. This 'genetic load'has been …

Human papillomavirus (HPV) causes virtually all cervical cancers and many cancers at other
anatomical sites in both men and women. However, only 12 of 448 known HPV types are …

Synonymous mutations in protein-coding genes do not alter protein sequences and are thus
generally presumed to be neutral or nearly neutral,,,–. Here, to experimentally verify this …

Abstract Background The 16S rRNA gene is used extensively in bacterial phylogenetics, in
species delineation, and now widely in microbiome studies. However, the gene suffers from …

Pleiotropy refers to the phenomenon of one gene or one mutation affecting multiple
phenotypic traits. While the concept of pleiotropy is as old as Mendelian genetics, functional …

Bacteria from the same species can differ widely in their gene content. In Escherichia coli,
the set of genes shared by all strains, known as the core genome, represents about half the …

The protein folding problem was first articulated as question of how order arose from
disorder in proteins: How did the various native structures of proteins arise from interatomic …

It has long been recognized that certain sites within a protein, such as sites in the protein
core or catalytic residues in enzymes, are evolutionarily more conserved than other sites …

Ubiquitous in eukaryotes, circular RNAs (circRNAs) comprise a large class of mostly non-
coding RNAs produced by back-splicing. Although some circRNAs have demonstrated …

In recent years, better instrumentation and greater computing power have enabled the
imaging of elusive biomolecule dynamics in cells, driving many advances in understanding …