Amji's salamander (Hynobius amjiensis) is a critically endangered species (IUCN Red List), which is endemic to mainland China. In the present study, five haplotypes were genotyped for the mtDNA cyt b gene in 45 specimens from three populations. Relatively low levels of haplotype diversity (h = 0.524) and nucleotide diversity (π = 0.00532) were detected. Analyses of the phylogenic structure of H...

Several molecular and genetic tools, browsers and servers are currently available online for biologists to access, analyze and process data. The BioExtract Server represents a powerful web-based data integration application, combining the most common biological databases with the most used algorithms by scientists from all the biological fields. This Server allows researchers to extract data, e...

Antennae are among the most elaborate sensory organs in adult flies, and they provide rich information for phylogenic studies. The antennae of five out of eight species of Gasterophilus Leach (G. haemorrhoidalis (Linnaeus), G. intestinalis (De Geer), G. nasalis (Linnaeus), G. nigricornis (Loew) and G. pecorum (Fabricius)), were examined using scanning electron microscopy. The general morphology...

One of the most important measures for detecting molecular adaptations between species/lineages at the gene level is the comparison of relative fixation rates of synonymous (dS) and non-synonymous (dN) mutations. This study shows that the branch model is sensitive to tree topology and proposes an alternative approach, devogs, which does not require phylogenetic topology for analysis. We compare...

Two species of Aedes (Stegomyia) were collected in response to the first chikungunya virus (CHIKV) outbreak on Yap Island: the native species Ae. hensilli Farner and the introduced species Ae. aegypti (L.). Fourteen CHIKV-positive mosquito pools were detected. Six pools were composed of female Ae. hensilli, six pools were composed of female Ae. aegypti, one pool was composed of male Ae. hensill...

The myb gene family encodes proteins characterized by a highly conserved DNA-binding domain and functions as transcription regulators. There are three myb genes in animals with three Myb-motif repeats, namely c-myb, A-myb, and B-myb. By contrast, plants possess an abundance of myb genes, the majority of which are of the type R2R3 (with two Myb-motifs). Few plant myb genes are of the type R1R2R3...

Protein sequence analysis is an important tool for researchers to study on bio-informatics and molecular biology, such as proteins structure and function prediction, phylogenetic classification and different conservation pattern recognition. It is a significant open issue to quickly efficiently find the similar proteins from a large scale of protein repository. This paper proposes a new method ...

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is responsible for large waterborne epidemics of acute hepatitis in endemic regions and for sporadic autochthonous cases in non endemic regions. Although the water vector has been thoroughly documented in endemic regions, very little is known about the modes of contamination occurring in non endemic regions. Unlike the other hepatitis viruses, HEV has an animal reservoir...