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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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  3. The efficient production, folding, and secretion of proteins is critical for cancer cell survival. However, cancer cells thrive under stress conditions that damage proteins, so many cancer cells overexpress mo...

    Authors: Sara Sannino and Jeffrey L. Brodsky
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:109
    Content type: Review Published on:

  4. Imaging as a means of scientific data storage has evolved rapidly over the past century from hand drawings, to photography, to digital images. Only recently can sufficiently large datasets be acquired, stored,...

    Authors: Josh L. Morgan and Jeff W. Lichtman
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:101
    Content type: Review Published on:

  5. The MultiBac baculovirus/insect cell expression vector system was conceived as a user-friendly, modular tool-kit for producing multiprotein complexes for structural biology applications. MultiBac has allowed t...

    Authors: Martin Pelosse, Hannah Crocker, Barbara Gorda, Paul Lemaire, Jens Rauch and Imre Berger
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:99
    Content type: Review Published on:

  6. Population geneticists have long sought to understand the contribution of natural selection to molecular evolution. A variety of approaches have been proposed that use population genetics theory to quantify th...

    Authors: Tom R. Booker, Benjamin C. Jackson and Peter D. Keightley
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:98
    Content type: Review Published on:

  7. Signaling pathways direct organogenesis, often through concentration-dependent effects on cells. The hedgehog pathway enables cells to sense and respond to hedgehog ligands, of which the best studied is sonic ...

    Authors: Robert Blassberg and John Jacob
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:95
    Content type: Review Published on:

  9. What made us human? Gene expression changes clearly played a significant part in human evolution, but pinpointing the causal regulatory mutations is hard. Comparative genomics enabled the identification of hum...

    Authors: Lucía F. Franchini and Katherine S. Pollard
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:89
    Content type: Review Published on:

  10. Antibiotic natural products are ancient and so is resistance. Consequently, environmental bacteria harbor numerous and varied antibiotic resistance elements. Nevertheless, despite long histories of antibiotic ...

    Authors: Nicholas Waglechner and Gerard D. Wright
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:84
    Content type: Review Published on:

  12. For a subset of genes in our genome a change in gene dosage, by duplication or deletion, causes a phenotypic effect. These dosage-sensitive genes may confer an advantage upon copy number change, but more typic...

    Authors: Alan M. Rice and Aoife McLysaght
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:78
    Content type: Review Published on:

  15. There is increasing evidence that all cells sense mechanical forces in order to perform their functions. In animals, mechanotransduction has been studied during the establishment of cell polarity, fate, and di...

    Authors: Olivier Hamant and Elizabeth S. Haswell
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:59
    Content type: Review Published on:

  16. Macrophages are present in all vertebrate tissues, from mid-gestation throughout life, constituting a widely dispersed organ system. They promote homeostasis by responding to internal and external changes with...

    Authors: Siamon Gordon and Annette Plüddemann
    Citation: BMC Biology 2017 15:53
    Content type: Review Published on:

  20. Probing dynamic processes occurring within the cell nucleus at the quantitative level has long been a challenge in mammalian biology. Advances in bio-imaging techniques over the past decade have enabled us to ...

    Authors: Ziqing W. Zhao, Melanie D. White, Stephanie Bissiere, Valeria Levi and Nicolas Plachta
    Citation: BMC Biology 2016 14:115
    Content type: Review Published on:

  21. In his splendid article “Can a biologist fix a radio? — or, what I learned while studying apoptosis,” Y. Lazebnik argues that when one uses the right tools, similarity between a biological system, like a signa...

    Authors: Mustafa Khammash
    Citation: BMC Biology 2016 14:22
    Content type: Review Published on:

  26. The rod is a ubiquitous shape adopted by walled cells from diverse organisms ranging from bacteria to fungi to plants. Although rod-like shapes are found in cells of vastly different sizes and are constructed ...

    Authors: Fred Chang and Kerwyn Casey Huang
    Citation: BMC Biology 2014 12:54
    Content type: Review Published on:

  27. In a majority of cell types, mitochondria form highly dynamic, tubular networks. Maintaining the shape of this complex network is critical for both mitochondrial and cellular function and involves the activiti...

    Authors: Laura L Lackner
    Citation: BMC Biology 2014 12:35
    Content type: Review Published on:

  28. Almost 20 years ago, the discovery that mitochondrial release of cytochrome c initiates a cascade that leads to cell death brought about a wholesale change in how cell biologists think of mitochondria. Formerl...

    Authors: Navdeep S Chandel
    Citation: BMC Biology 2014 12:34
    Content type: Review Published on:

  30. The new field of viral dynamics, based on within-host modeling of viral infections, began with models of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), but now includes many viral infections. Here we review developments ...

    Authors: Alan S Perelson and Ruy M Ribeiro
    Citation: BMC Biology 2013 11:96
    Content type: Review Published on:

  31. The posttranslational modification of target proteins with ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like proteins is accomplished by the sequential action of E1, E2, and E3 enzymes. Members of the E1 and E3 enzyme families can...

    Authors: Sonja Lorenz, Aaron J Cantor, Michael Rape and John Kuriyan
    Citation: BMC Biology 2013 11:65
    Content type: Review Published on:

  32. Long non-protein-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are proposed to be the largest transcript class in the mouse and human transcriptomes. Two important questions are whether all lncRNAs are functional and how they could e...

    Authors: Aleksandra E Kornienko, Philipp M Guenzl, Denise P Barlow and Florian M Pauler
    Citation: BMC Biology 2013 11:59
    Content type: Review Published on:

  33. First discovered in Drosophila, the Hedgehog signaling pathway controls a wide range of developmental processes and is implicated in a variety of cancers. The success of a screen for chemical modulators of this p...

    Authors: Tom J Carney and Philip W Ingham
    Citation: BMC Biology 2013 11:37
    Content type: Review Published on: