SUMMARY Since Ebola virus was discovered in 1970s, the virus has persisted in Africa and sporadic fatal outbreaks in humans and non-human primates have been reported. However, the evolutionary history of Ebola virus remains unclear. In this study, 27 Ebola virus strains with complete glycoprotein genes, including five species (Zaire, Sudan, Reston, Tai Forest, Bundibugyo), were analysed. Here, ...

W e celebrate this year the sesquicentennial anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (1), one of the most important books ever written. The two great themes of The Origin are descent, with modification, of diverse species from common ancestors, and natural selection, which Darwin proposed as the chief agent of modification. He remarked, in Chapter VI, that ‘‘it is generally a...

We integrate information from the fossil record, morphology, behavior and molecular studies to provide a current overview of lorisoid evolution. Several Eocene prosimians of the northern continents, including both omomyids and adapoids, have been suggested as possible lorisoid ancestors, but these cannot be substantiated as true strepsirhines. A small-bodied primate, Anchomomys, of the middle E...

microRNAs (miRNAs) are short noncoding regulatory genes that perform important roles in plant development and physiology. With the increasing power of next generation sequencing technologies and the development of bioinformatic tools, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of studies surveying the miRNAomes of plant species, which has led to an explosion in the number of described miR...

While some scientists have been working to sequence and describe the human genome, with increasingly dramatic results, another set of scientists has been quietly providing a map of evolutionary history, a time line that shows how life has evolved. Unlike the genome projects, which accumulate megabases of sequence from many genes in one organism, evolutionary projects accumulate megabases of seq...

human language, over its evolutionary history, has emerged as one of the fundamental defining characteristic of the modern man. however, this milestone evolutionary process through natural selection has not left any ’linguistic fossils’ that may enable us to trace back the actual course of development of language and its establishment in human societies. lacking analytical tools to fathom the cr...