460 papers
This study demonstrates that while European beech trees can undergo rapid genomic selection to adapt to contemporary warming, their evolutionary capacity is likely to be outpaced by high-emission climate change scenarios, threatening their long-term persistence.
By constructing a single-cell and spatial transcriptomic atlas across 23 vertebrate species, this study elucidates the cellular and molecular adaptations driving stomach evolution in response to dietary shifts, identifying key genes like LUC7L that are essential for rumination and offering targets for engineering digestive capabilities and treating gastric motility disorders.
The paper introduces PRIME, a novel framework of codon-level maximum likelihood models that explicitly links amino acid substitution patterns to physicochemical properties, thereby revealing the mechanistic biophysical drivers of protein evolution and offering superior interpretability and predictive power compared to traditional rate-based methods.
This study reveals that the diverse morphological innovations of molluscan shells arose not from entirely new cellular inventions, but through the repeated co-option of ancestral secretory programs present in the last common ancestor of Spiralia, supplemented by evolutionarily young genes to create distinct, developmentally independent shell-forming cell types.
This study reveals that while the densovirus AalDV2 generally imposes fitness costs on *Aedes albopictus* by delaying development and reducing body size, it paradoxically enhances larval survival under extreme heat stress (34°C), suggesting that temperature-dependent protective effects could complicate the use of this virus for mosquito biocontrol in a warming climate.
This paper proposes the Thermoregulatory Theory of Regenerative Scope, arguing that the evolution of endothermy drove the specialization of thermogenic calcium-handling systems in excitable tissues, where futile Ca2+ cycling inadvertently promotes inflammatory and fibrotic pathways that inhibit functional regeneration in complex organs like the CNS.
This paper introduces the Gaussian Coalescent model, a computationally efficient framework that approximates the joint distribution of trait data by simultaneously accounting for incomplete lineage sorting and gene flow, thereby offering a more accurate alternative to standard phylogenetic comparative methods that ignore these evolutionary complexities.
This paper presents a low-cost, in-house electroporation buffer that achieves transfection efficiency comparable to proprietary reagents, thereby increasing the accessibility of choanoflagellate genetic research and broadening participation in studies of animal origins.
Genomic analysis of American Beefalo reveals that most individuals lack the required bison ancestry, with many showing no detectable bison genes at all and instead exhibiting zebu cattle ancestry, thereby challenging the breed's official definition and highlighting significant barriers to gene flow between bison and cattle.
This paper argues that the "mutational drought" caused by a shortage of beneficial mutations is a driver of extinction vortices comparable to, and often more significant than, the accumulation of deleterious mutations, particularly in changing environments, suggesting conservation efforts must prioritize adaptive potential alongside genetic load.
This study characterizes multiple cold tolerance phenotypes in *Drosophila ananassae* populations, revealing sex-specific differences and a lack of correlation between traits, while using bulk segregant analysis on recombinant inbred lines to identify 16 genomic regions enriched in muscle development and metabolic processes that underlie adaptive cold tolerance.
This study demonstrates that rapid evolutionary diversification in African cichlids is primarily driven by the accelerated evolution of alternative splicing, where ancestral isoforms increase in frequency and novel variants emerge quickly to facilitate ecological adaptation, rather than by changes in gene expression levels.
This study reveals that the rapid adaptive radiation of Lake Victoria cichlids is driven by a modular and redundant genomic architecture of hybrid origin, which allows key traits to be reshuffled like "Lego bricks" into diverse combinations through combinatorial speciation.
This study demonstrates through computational modeling that multicellular reproduction emerges from the co-option of ancestral ecological interactions, where spatial resource distribution drives the evolution of dispersal strategies using single-celled propagules derived from unicellular neighbor-interaction programs.
This paper introduces diempy, an efficient Python implementation of the reference-free genome polarisation algorithm diem, which provides tools for converting, processing, and visualising genomic data to enable practical and reproducible studies of population structure, admixture, and species barriers without relying on unrealistic pure reference panels.
This study reveals that the paralysis-causing sigmavirus (BtSV) in Queensland fruit flies is transmitted biparentally with maternal dominance, exhibits inefficient horizontal spread, and induces CO2-induced paralysis and mortality, suggesting broad implications for arthropod virus dynamics and pest management.
This paper demonstrates that the specific functional form of sexually antagonistic environmental effects (Charnov-Bull effects) critically determines the evolutionary stability of environmental sex determination, influencing whether sex-biasing alleles invade to fixation or persist at intermediate frequencies to create mixed systems.
By analyzing high-quality telomere-to-telomere genome assemblies across eight primate species, this study reveals that while Y-linked ampliconic genes are primarily under purifying selection, X-linked ampliconic gene families exhibit pervasive positive selection and dynamic copy number variation, likely driven by sperm competition, meiotic drive, or dosage-dependent selection.
Experimental evolution of *Salmonella enterica* lacking the *trpF* gene demonstrates that bifunctional genetic solutions restoring tryptophan biosynthesis can arise through point mutations in either *hisA* or *trpA* without gene duplication, with *trpA* mutations being more frequent and less costly to ancestral function than *hisA* mutations.
This paper proposes that geochemical changes around 3.9–3.8 billion years ago triggered a mass extinction of ribozymes, from which resilient "generalist" survivors like the hammerhead ribozyme expanded as disaster taxa, leaving an ecological legacy that fundamentally shaped the structure and organization of the modern genetic code.