PLOS is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launched its first journal, PLOS Biology, in October 2003.
Euarchontoglires, synonymous with Supraprimates, is a clade and a superorder of mammals, the living members of which belong to one of the five following groups: rodents, lagomorphs, treeshrews, primates, and colugos.
The SOS response is a global response to DNA damage in which the cell cycle is arrested and DNA repair and mutagenesis are induced. The system involves the RecA protein. The RecA protein, stimulated by single-stranded DNA, is involved in the inactivation of the repressor (LexA) of SOS response genes thereby inducing the response. It is an error-prone repair system that contributes significantly to DNA changes observed in a wide range of species.
Michael Ashburner was an English biologist and Professor in the Department of Genetics at University of Cambridge. He also served as joint-head and co-founder of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Laurasiatheria is a superorder of placental mammals that groups together true insectivores (eulipotyphlans), bats (chiropterans), carnivorans, pangolins (pholidotes), even-toed ungulates (artiodactyls), odd-toed ungulates (perissodactyls), and all their extinct relatives. From systematics and phylogenetic perspectives, it is subdivided into order Eulipotyphla and clade Scrotifera. It is a sister group to Euarchontoglires with which it forms the magnorder Boreoeutheria. Laurasiatheria was discovered on the basis of the similar gene sequences shared by the mammals belonging to it; no anatomical features have yet been found that unite the group, although a few have been suggested such as a small coracoid process, a simplified hindgut, high intelligence, lack of grasping hands and allantoic vessels that are large to moderate in size. The Laurasiatheria clade is based on DNA sequence analyses and retrotransposon presence/absence data. The superorder originated on the northern supercontinent of Laurasia, after it split from Gondwana when Pangaea broke up. Its last common ancestor is supposed to have lived between ca. 76 to 90 million years ago.
Cohesin is a protein complex that mediates sister chromatid cohesion, homologous recombination, and DNA looping. Cohesin is formed of SMC3, SMC1, SCC1 and SCC3. Cohesin holds sister chromatids together after DNA replication until anaphase when removal of cohesin leads to separation of sister chromatids. The complex forms a ring-like structure and it is believed that sister chromatids are held together by entrapment inside the cohesin ring. Cohesin is a member of the SMC family of protein complexes which includes Condensin, MukBEF and SMC-ScpAB.
Boreoeutheria is a magnorder of placental mammals that groups together superorders Euarchontoglires and Laurasiatheria. With a few exceptions, male boreoeutherians have a scrotum, an ancestral feature of the clade. The sub-clade Scrotifera was named after this feature.
In the field of molecular biology, nuclear receptors are a class of proteins responsible for sensing steroids, thyroid hormones, vitamins, and certain other molecules. These intracellular receptors work with other proteins to regulate the expression of specific genes, thereby controlling the development, homeostasis, and metabolism of the organism.
The recombination-activating genes (RAGs) encode parts of a protein complex that plays important roles in the rearrangement and recombination of the genes encoding immunoglobulin and T cell receptor molecules. There are two recombination-activating genes RAG1 and RAG2, whose cellular expression is restricted to lymphocytes during their developmental stages. The enzymes encoded by these genes, RAG-1 and RAG-2, are essential to the generation of mature B cells and T cells, two types of lymphocyte that are crucial components of the adaptive immune system.
RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) or RNA replicase is an enzyme that catalyzes the replication of RNA from an RNA template. Specifically, it catalyzes synthesis of the RNA strand complementary to a given RNA template. This is in contrast to typical DNA-dependent RNA polymerases, which all organisms use to catalyze the transcription of RNA from a DNA template.
Martin Edward Kreitman is an American geneticist at the University of Chicago, most well known for the McDonald–Kreitman test that is used to infer the amount of adaptive evolution in population genetic studies.
Jonathan Andrew Eisen is an American evolutionary biologist, currently working at University of California, Davis. His academic research is in the fields of evolutionary biology, genomics and microbiology and he is the academic editor-in-chief of the open access journal PLOS Biology.
PR domain zinc finger protein 9 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the PRDM9 gene. PRDM9 is responsible for positioning recombination hotspots during meiosis by binding a DNA sequence motif encoded in its zinc finger domain. PRDM9 is the only speciation gene found so far in mammals, and is one of the fastest evolving genes in the genome.
The Panton Principles are a set of principles which were written to promote open science. They were first drafted in July 2009 at the Panton Arms pub in Cambridge.
Article-level metrics are citation metrics which measure the usage and impact of individual scholarly articles.
Mathieu Daniel Blanchette is a computational biologist and Director of the School of Computer Science at McGill University. His research focuses on developing new algorithms for the detection of functional regions in DNA sequences.
The invertebrate mitochondrial code is a genetic code used by the mitochondrial genome of invertebrates. Mitochondria contain their own DNA and reproduce independently from their host cell. Variation in translation of the mitochondrial genetic code occurs when DNA codons result in non-standard amino acids has been identified in invertebrates, most notably arthropods. This variation has been helpful as a tool to improve upon the phylogenetic tree of invertebrates, like flatworms.
Kaustuv Sanyal is an Indian molecular biologist, mycologist and Director of Bose Institute in Kolkata. He is a professor at the Molecular Biology and Genetics Unit of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR). He is known for his molecular and genetic studies of pathogenic yeasts such as Candida and Cryptococcus). An alumnus of Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya and Madurai Kamaraj University from where he earned a BSc in agriculture and MSc in biotechnology respectively, Sanyal did his doctoral studies at Bose Institute to secure a PhD in Yeast genetics. He moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA to work in the laboratory of John Carbon on the discovery of centromeres in Candida albicans. He joined JNCASR in 2005. He is a member of the Faculty of 1000 in the disciplines of Microbial Evolution and Genomics and has delivered invited speeches which include the Gordon Research Conference, EMBO conferences on comparative genomics and kinetochores. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences, in 2012. He has also been awarded with the prestigious Tata Innovation Fellowship in 2017. The National Academy of Sciences, India elected him as a fellow in 2014. He is also an elected fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences (2017), and the Indian National Science Academy (2018). In 2019, he has been elected to Fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM), the honorific leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology. He was awarded the J.C. Bose National Fellowship in 2020.
Adam C. Eyre-Walker, is a British evolutionary geneticist, currently Professor of Biology in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex. He is noted for making "significant contributions to our understanding of evolution at the molecular level" and pioneering the use of DNA sequence databases for extracting information about the evolution of genomes.
