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The authors review our understanding of how common genetic variation contributes to behavioural diversity, explaining how these variants modulate an organism's interaction with the environment and defining gene classes — such as those affecting sensory or neuromodulatory pathways — that are preferentially associated with behavioural variation.
Systems biology is intrinsically reliant on software tools and data resources. Through looking at each stage in a systems biology workflow, this Review presents the available options and key challenges, and sets out the concept of an integrated software platform.
Organisms are exposed to various stresses, and responding rapidly and appropriately to these changes is crucial for survival. This Review describes how gene expression is regulated at many levels in response to stresses, including through signalling to chromatin or affecting transcriptional machinery.
Our increasing understanding of microRNA biology, combined with sequence information from diverse animal genomes, has shed light on how microRNAs and their targets evolve and how the evolution of microRNA-containing regulatory networks has contributed to organismal complexity.
The role of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) in disease is best understood for microRNAs in cancer. However, there is increasing interest in the disease-related roles of other ncRNAs — including piRNAs, snoRNAs, T-UCRs and lncRNAs — and in using this knowledge for therapy.
Drawing on evidence from diverse species, the authors argue that aspects of gene anatomy and genome architecture have evolved to prevent or mitigate gene expression errors. These aspects range from codon usage to the arrangement of genes in the genome.
