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BMC Biology Reviews

Iconic imageBMC Biology publishes authoritative reviews on diverse topics. All reviews are open access and therefore free to read and share.

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  2. In adult mammals, including humans, neurons, and axons in the brain and spinal cord are inherently incapable of regenerating after injury. Studies of animals with innate capacity for regeneration are providing...

    Authors: Brianna R. Cellini, Sreeparvathy Vayankara Edachola, Timothy D. Faw and Valentina Cigliola
    Citation: BMC Biology 2025 23:115
    Content type: Review Published on:

  4. Mechanical stimulation, including wind exposure, is a common environmental factor for plants and can significantly impact plant phenotype, development, and growth. Most responses to external mechanical stimula...

    Authors: Annalene Hansen, Agnieszka Gladala-Kostarz, Rebecca Hindhaugh, John H. Doonan and Maurice Bosch
    Citation: BMC Biology 2025 23:58
    Content type: Review Published on:

  5. The discovery of diverse molecular mechanisms of regulated cell death has opened new avenues for cancer therapy. Ferroptosis, a unique form of cell death driven by iron-catalyzed peroxidation of membrane phosp...

    Authors: Roberto Fernández-Acosta, Iuliana Vintea, Ine Koeken, Behrouz Hassannia and Tom Vanden Berghe
    Citation: BMC Biology 2025 23:57
    Content type: Review Published on:

  12. The vast majority of the food we eat comes from land-based agriculture, but recent technological advances in agriculture and food technology offer the prospect of producing food using substantially less or eve...

    Authors: H. Charles J. Godfray, Joseph Poore and Hannah Ritchie
    Citation: BMC Biology 2024 22:138
    Content type: Review Published on:

  14. Physical activity and several pharmacological approaches individually combat age-associated conditions and extend healthy longevity in model systems. It is tantalizing to extrapolate that combining geroprotect...

    Authors: Christian J. Elliehausen, Rozalyn M. Anderson, Gary M. Diffee, Timothy W. Rhoads, Dudley W. Lamming, Troy A. Hornberger and Adam R. Konopka
    Citation: BMC Biology 2023 21:287
    Content type: Review Published on:

  16. Sex chromosomes are typically viewed as having originated from a pair of autosomes, and differentiated as the sex-limited chromosome (e.g. Y) has degenerated by losing most genes through cessation of recombina...

    Authors: Aivars Cīrulis, Bengt Hansson and Jessica K. Abbott
    Citation: BMC Biology 2022 20:156
    Content type: Review Published on:

  17. Marine sponges (phylum Porifera) form symbioses with diverse microbial communities that can be transmitted between generations through their developmental stages. Here, we integrate embryology and microbiology...

    Authors: Tyler J. Carrier, Manuel Maldonado, Lara Schmittmann, Lucía Pita, Thomas C. G. Bosch and Ute Hentschel
    Citation: BMC Biology 2022 20:100
    Content type: Review Published on:

  18. Stem cells (SCs) in vertebrates typically reside in “stem cell niches” (SCNs), morphologically restricted tissue microenvironments that are important for SC survival and proliferation. SCNs are broadly defined...

    Authors: P. Martinez, L. Ballarin, A. V. Ereskovsky, E. Gazave, B. Hobmayer, L. Manni, E. Rottinger, S. G. Sprecher, S. Tiozzo, A. Varela-Coelho and B. Rinkevich
    Citation: BMC Biology 2022 20:23
    Content type: Review Published on:

  19. Cell membrane fusion and multinucleation in macrophages are associated with physiologic homeostasis as well as disease. Osteoclasts are multinucleated macrophages that resorb bone through increased metabolic a...

    Authors: Antoni Olona, Subhankar Mukhopadhyay, Charlotte Hateley, Fernando O. Martinez, Siamon Gordon and Jacques Behmoaras
    Citation: BMC Biology 2021 19:246
    Content type: Review Published on:

  21. Plasma membrane integrity is essential for cellular homeostasis. In vivo, cells experience plasma membrane damage from a multitude of stressors in the extra- and intra-cellular environment. To avoid lethal con...

    Authors: Dustin A. Ammendolia, William M. Bement and John H. Brumell
    Citation: BMC Biology 2021 19:71
    Content type: Review Published on:

  22. The preservative effects of low temperature on biological materials have been long recognised, and cryopreservation is now widely used in biomedicine, including in organ transplantation, regenerative medicine ...

    Authors: Sanja Bojic, Alex Murray, Barry L. Bentley, Ralf Spindler, Piotr Pawlik, José L. Cordeiro, Roman Bauer and João Pedro de Magalhães
    Citation: BMC Biology 2021 19:56
    Content type: Review Published on:

  24. The traditional view of protein aggregation as being strictly disease-related has been challenged by many examples of cellular aggregates that regulate beneficial biological functions. When coupled with the em...

    Authors: Giulio Chiesa, Szilvia Kiriakov and Ahmad S. Khalil
    Citation: BMC Biology 2020 18:35
    Content type: Review Published on:

  25. Recent developments within micro-computed tomography (μCT) imaging have combined to extend our capacity to image tissue in three (3D) and four (4D) dimensions at micron and sub-micron spatial resolutions, open...

    Authors: Shelley D. Rawson, Jekaterina Maksimcuka, Philip J. Withers and Sarah H. Cartmell
    Citation: BMC Biology 2020 18:21
    Content type: Review Published on:

  26. Nitrogen is an essential element of life, and nitrogen availability often limits crop yields. Since the Green Revolution, massive amounts of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers have been produced from atmospheric n...

    Authors: Vânia C. S. Pankievicz, Thomas B. Irving, Lucas G. S. Maia and Jean-Michel Ané
    Citation: BMC Biology 2019 17:99
    Content type: Review Published on:

  28. The human upper respiratory tract (URT) offers a variety of niches for microbial colonization. Local microbial communities are shaped by the different characteristics of the specific location within the URT, b...

    Authors: Christina Kumpitsch, Kaisa Koskinen, Veronika Schöpf and Christine Moissl-Eichinger
    Citation: BMC Biology 2019 17:87
    Content type: Review Published on:

  29. The human gut harbors a complex ecosystem of microorganisms, including bacteria and viruses. With the rise of next-generation sequencing technologies, we have seen a quantum leap in the study of human-gut-inha...

    Authors: Sanzhima Garmaeva, Trishla Sinha, Alexander Kurilshikov, Jingyuan Fu, Cisca Wijmenga and Alexandra Zhernakova
    Citation: BMC Biology 2019 17:84
    Content type: Review Published on:

  31. As a “holy grail” of neuroscience, optical imaging of membrane potential could enable high resolution measurements of spiking and synaptic activity in neuronal populations. This has been partly achieved using ...

    Authors: Yuki Bando, Christiane Grimm, Victor H Cornejo and Rafael Yuste
    Citation: BMC Biology 2019 17:71
    Content type: Review Published on:

  32. Cell-free systems (CFS) have recently evolved into key platforms for synthetic biology applications. Many synthetic biology tools have traditionally relied on cell-based systems, and while their adoption has s...

    Authors: Aidan Tinafar, Katariina Jaenes and Keith Pardee
    Citation: BMC Biology 2019 17:64
    Content type: Review Published on:

  33. This review discusses the current state of the viral metabolism field and gaps in knowledge that will be important for future studies to investigate. We discuss metabolic rewiring caused by viruses, the influe...

    Authors: Shivani K. Thaker, James Ch’ng and Heather R. Christofk
    Citation: BMC Biology 2019 17:59
    Content type: Review Published on:

  35. Perturbed mitochondrial bioenergetics constitute a core pillar of cancer-associated metabolic dysfunction. While mitochondrial dysfunction in cancer may result from myriad biochemical causes, a historically ne...

    Authors: Payam A. Gammage and Christian Frezza
    Citation: BMC Biology 2019 17:53
    Content type: Review Published on:

  40. Photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation became evolutionarily immutable as “frozen metabolic accidents” because multiple interactions between the proteins and protein complexes involved led to their co-evolution ...

    Authors: Dario Leister
    Citation: BMC Biology 2019 17:8
    Content type: Review Published on:

  41. Between the 1930s and 50s, evolutionary biologists developed a successful theory of why organisms age, firmly rooted in population genetic principles. By the 1980s the evolution of aging had a secure experimen...

    Authors: Thomas Flatt and Linda Partridge
    Citation: BMC Biology 2018 16:93
    Content type: Review Published on:

  43. Spatial organization of membrane domains within cells and cells within tissues is key to the development of organisms and the maintenance of adult tissue. Cell polarization is crucial for correct cell–cell sig...

    Authors: Ana-Citlali Gradilla, David Sanchez-Hernandez, Lucy Brunt and Steffen Scholpp
    Citation: BMC Biology 2018 16:37
    Content type: Review Published on:

  45. The need for high-throughput, precise, and meaningful methods for measuring behavior has been amplified by our recent successes in measuring and manipulating neural circuitry. The largest challenges associated...

    Authors: Gordon J. Berman
    Citation: BMC Biology 2018 16:23
    Content type: Review Published on:

  46. Paraphrasing Dobzhansky’s famous dictum, I discuss how interrogating cancer through the lens of evolution has transformed our understanding of its development, causality and treatment resistance. The emerging ...

    Authors: Mel Greaves
    Citation: BMC Biology 2018 16:22
    Content type: Review Published on:

  47. Efficient movement of proteins across membranes is required for cell health. The translocation process is particularly challenging when the channel in the membrane through which proteins must pass is narrow—su...

    Authors: Elizabeth A. Craig
    Citation: BMC Biology 2018 16:11
    Content type: Review Published on:

  50. The trillions of microbes living in the gut—the gut microbiota—play an important role in human biology and disease. While much has been done to explore its diversity, a full understanding of our microbiomes de...

    Authors: Emily R. Davenport, Jon G. Sanders, Se Jin Song, Katherine R. Amato, Andrew G. Clark and Rob Knight
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:127
    Content type: Review Published on: