from a mainstream paper: Why sex chromosomes turn over and remain undifferentiated in some taxa, whereas they degenerate in others, is still an area of ongoing research. The recurrent occurrence of homologous and homomorphic sex chromosomes in distantly related taxa suggests their independent evolution or continued recombination since their first emergence. Here, we focus on […]

I will repeat myself again, but i have to say it one more time – it is not easy to understand how natural selection works. Deep-sea species. One would expect, that so deep, where is no light, no eyes are needed at all. But not this time … Here, random mutations AKA unguided natural process […]

What is left of common ancestry and shared DNA errors ? A pseudogene is defined to be a gene that has lost its function, especially it has lost the ability of coding protein. In general, a pseudogene is generated by gain of premature stop codons due to point mutations or flame-shift mutations. The acceptance of […]

The adaptive evolution of the mtDNA may reflect that aerobic metabolism plays a more important role than anaerobic metabolism in deep-sea fishes, whose energy sources (food) are extremely limited. This strategy maximizes the usage of energy sources. Eleven mitochondrial genes have convergent/parallel amino acid changes between branches of deep-sea fishes. Thus, these amino acid sites […]

Here we show that a missense mutation in rhodopsin (Phe261Tyr) is an adaptation to the red-shifted Baltic Sea light environment. The transition from phenylalanine to tyrosine differs only by the presence of a hydroxyl moiety in the latter, but this results in an up to 10-nm red-shifted light absorbance of the receptor. Remarkably, an examination […]