ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Repeated elevational transitions in hemoglobin function during the evolution of Andean hummingbirds.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 101 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
101 citing papers in PubMed, 222 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mechanisms of Phenotypic Evolution from Molecules to Organisms: Integrating Evolutionary Biochemistry and Evolutionary Developmental Biology.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2026Article
- Pollinator efficiency, rather than bee decline, explains a shift to hummingbird pollination in tropical montane forests.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- The genetic foundations of convergent traits.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- RECUR: identifying recurrent amino acid substitutions from multiple sequence alignments.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Great expectations: altricial developmental strategies are associated with more flexible evolution of limb skeleton proportions in birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Global Environmental Factors Impact the Evolution of Adult Hemoglobins in Squamata Reptiles (Lizards and Snakes) and Terrestrial Turtles.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Integrating Intermediate Traits in Phylogenetic Genotype-to-Phenotype Studies.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Review
- Stronger Evidence for Relaxed Selection Than Adaptive Evolution in High-elevation Animal mtDNA.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Gas exchange, oxygen transport and metabolism in high-altitude waterfowl.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Specialization Restricts the Evolutionary Paths Available to Yeast Sugar Transporters.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Elevational and Seasonal Patterns of Plant-Hummingbird Interactions in a High Tropical Mountain.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Genetic characterization of Tibetan pigs adapted to high altitude under natural selection based on a large whole-genome dataset.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Specialization restricts the evolutionary paths available to yeast sugar transporters.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Endurance athletes hiding in plain sight in the high Andes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Extreme elevational migration spurred cryptic speciation in giant hummingbirds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Recurrent evolutionary switches of mitochondrial cytochrome c maturation systems in Archaeplastida.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Stronger evidence for relaxed selection than adaptive evolution in high-elevation animal mtDNA.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Genomic Variation, Population History, and Long-Term Genetic Adaptation to High Altitudes in Tibetan Partridge (Perdix hodgsoniae).Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Polygenic routes lead to parallel altitudinal adaptation in Heliosperma pusillum (Caryophyllaceae).Molecular ecology · 2023Article
41 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 6 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Animals that sustain high levels of aerobic activity under hypoxic conditions (e.g., birds that fly at high altitude) face the physiological challenge of jointly optimizing blood-O2 affinity for O2 loading in the pulmonary circulation and O2 unloading in the systemic circulation. At high altitude, this challenge is especially acute for small endotherms like hummingbirds that have exceedingly high mass-specific metabolic rates. Here we report an experimental analysis of hemoglobin (Hb) function in South American hummingbirds that revealed a positive correlation between Hb-O2 affinity and native elevation. Protein engineering experiments and ancestral-state reconstructions revealed that this correlation is attributable to derived increases in Hb-O2 affinity in highland lineages, as well as derived reductions in Hb-O2 affinity in lowland lineages. Site-directed mutagenesis experiments demonstrated that repeated evolutionary transitions in biochemical phenotype are mainly attributable to repeated amino acid replacements at two epistatically interacting sites that alter the allosteric regulation of Hb-O2 affinity. These results demonstrate that repeated changes in biochemical phenotype involve parallelism at the molecular level, and that mutations with indirect, second-order effects on Hb allostery play key roles in biochemical adaptation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.