295 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.
This study demonstrates that hybridization between thermally adapted Icelandic stickleback populations disrupts metabolic and mitochondrial gene networks through transgressive expression, particularly under warmer conditions, highlighting how climate-driven mixing can generate maladaptive outcomes despite high phenotypic plasticity.
This paper presents a scalable extension of the SNaQ method that enables fast, composite-likelihood inference of arbitrary binary semi-directed phylogenetic networks beyond level-1, significantly improving the ability to reconstruct complex reticulate evolutionary histories such as hybridization and introgression from genomic data.
This study demonstrates that frequent seasonal reassortment between high- and low-pathogenicity influenza A/H5N1 viruses, driven by specific host and spatial dynamics in the Americas, is a predictable ecological process that generates novel genotypes with significant pandemic risk.
By reconstructing the protein interactome of the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA) through comparative genomics and large-scale proteomics, this study reveals ancient molecular complexes that illuminate the biochemical origins of modern genetic diseases, including new associations for bone density and congenital birth defects.
This paper proposes and validates through agent-based simulation that sexual selection functions as a mechanism for preserving evolutionary information by sustaining historically adaptive traits via Fisherian co-evolution, thereby enabling lineages to respond more efficiently to fluctuating environments compared to random mating.
This study presents a comprehensive transcriptomic atlas of 61 animal species across 13 phyla, revealing that while zygotic genome activation (ZGA) timing varies widely, it is universally predicted by the nuclear-to-cytoplasmic ratio and involves a flexible yet deeply conserved molecular program characterized by phylogenetically younger, shorter genes enriched in RNA processing.
By analyzing over 63,000 karyotypes across 55 eukaryotic clades, this study reveals that chromosomal evolution rates vary dramatically by up to 844-fold and are governed primarily by life history and population structure rather than deep phylogenetic constraints or kingdom boundaries.
This paper applies posterior simulation-based calibration tests to phylogenetic dating methods in BEAST 2 using both tip-dated and node-dated datasets, confirming that the inference machinery is unbiased and correctly calibrated despite fundamental theoretical limits on the precision of node age estimates.
This study reveals that while horizontal gene transfer from diverse bacterial lineages shaped the nuclear genome of *Paulinella micropora*, the early integration of its chromatophore was primarily driven by the host's vertical inheritance and retargeting of proteins rather than by gene acquisition.
By constructing the largest eukaryotic pangenome to date from over 1,000 *Aspergillus fumigatus* isolates, this study reveals that the pathogen's open pangenome is shaped by slow, structured gene gain and loss driven by mobile elements like Starships, which underpin antifungal resistance evolution beyond simple point mutations.