337 papers
Evolutionary biology explores the dynamic history of life on Earth, tracing how species change, adapt, and diversify over time. This field investigates the mechanisms driving everything from the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria to the complex social behaviors of primates, revealing the deep connections that bind all living organisms together.
On Gist.Science, we ensure these groundbreaking discoveries remain accessible by processing every new preprint uploaded to bioRxiv in this category. Our team generates both plain-language overviews and detailed technical summaries for each paper, bridging the gap between raw research and public understanding without requiring a specialized background.
Below are the latest studies in evolutionary biology, offering fresh insights into the ongoing story of life.
The paper introduces AmpliPhy, an open-source pipeline that improves phylogenetic reconstruction of protein families by enriching multiple sequence alignments with homologous sequences, which significantly enhances tree accuracy and root placement while having minimal impact on alignment quality.
This study applies a specialized quantitative genetics framework to analyze lifetime growth curves in the common lizard (*Zootoca vivipara*), revealing that genetic variation in the shape of growth trajectories—rather than just intrinsic size—drives adaptive potential, with distinct patterns observed across wild and mesocosm populations and between sexes.
This study establishes a strong linear relationship between the complexity of viral genetic information processing and viral diversity, demonstrating that viruses with simpler propagation strategies consistently exhibit greater diversification across taxonomic levels and time.
The paper introduces HyperMk2, a method that reduces the state space of the hypercubic Mk model using a Fitch-like parsimony algorithm to enable efficient, reversible coevolutionary analysis of large numbers of coupled binary characters, overcoming previous computational limitations.
A meta-analysis of 1,600 Arabidopsis thaliana germplasm across 42 field trials reveals a significant thermal adaptation lag of over 1.91°C, indicating that even this highly adaptable species has failed to keep pace with recent climate change, resulting in a 14% cumulative fitness burden and a projected 30% loss in demographic potential by 2025 under moderate emissions scenarios.
This study utilizes whole-genome sequencing of modern and museum specimens to reveal that black-footed cats possess low genetic diversity driven by historically small population sizes and recent contraction, yet exhibit greater range-wide connectivity than previously assumed, providing critical genomic insights for their conservation.
This study analyzes synonymous single-nucleotide polymorphisms across 157 *Escherichia coli* strains to demonstrate that specific mutation patterns are expression-dependent but strand-independent, providing evidence for the role of transcription-induced mutagenesis in shaping genomic variation.
By analyzing whole-genome sequences of lanternfishes across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, this study reveals widespread shared genetic adaptations to climate change, identifying 34 candidate genes involved in responses to warming, ocean acidification, and hypoxia.
This study reveals that while global *wMel* Wolbachia frequencies in *Drosophila melanogaster* are primarily shaped by local climatic conditions affecting maternal transmission, the observed genomic variation reflects a recent, incomplete cytoplasmic sweep rather than local adaptation.
This study reveals that a domesticated, four-gene totivirus-like tandem array in *Scheffersomyces* yeasts underwent interspecific transfer and asymmetric evolution, where paralogs escaped strong purifying selection to explore sequence space while maintaining a conserved core fold, thereby violating the expectation that domesticated viral elements evolve more slowly than their exogenous progenitors.