The assumptions underpinning ancestral state reconstruction are violated in many
evolutionary systems, especially for traits under directional selection. However, the accuracy …

The amniotic egg with its complex fetal membranes was a key innovation in vertebrate
evolution that enabled the great diversification of reptiles, birds and mammals. It is debated …

Megadiverse insect groups present special difficulties for biogeographers because poor
classification, incomplete knowledge of taxonomy, and many undescribed species can …

“Living fossil” is a contentious label, often used to identify clades that have experienced
particularly little evolutionary change. Many of the problems associated with the term are …

Plant chemistry can be a key driver of host shifts in herbivores. Several species in the sawfly
genus Athalia are important economic pests on Brassicaceae, whereas other Athalia …

A discrete optimization problem of assigning linearly ordered character-states to the
hypothetical ancestors of an evolutionary tree under the principle of maximum parsimony …

Background Mammalian embryonic stem cells display a unique epigenetic and
transcriptional state to facilitate pluripotency by maintaining lineage-specification genes in a …

Inferring the transmission direction between linked individuals living with HIV provides
unparalleled power to understand the epidemiology that determines transmission …

A combinatorial optimization problem regarding assignments of real numbers (called
reconstructions) on a tree has been discussed in phylogenetic analysis. Recently, a clear …

This paper describes a dynamic programming algorithm to solve a family of problems in the
reconstruction of evolutionary trees from protein sequence data, that of constructing" …