460 papers
This study utilizes whole-genome sequencing of 418 British oak individuals to reveal distinct ecological niches and geographic distributions for *Quercus robur* and *Q. petraea*, extensive hybridization biased toward *Q. robur* introgression, the presence of rare triploid individuals with superior growth rates, and specific genomic islands of differentiation despite widespread gene flow.
By integrating cytogenetic and genomic mapping across a 50-million-year timeline, this study reveals that the structural evolution of the allotetraploid *Xenopus borealis* involved 17 rearrangements accumulating in three distinct temporal strata while maintaining persistent sex chromosome homomorphism, challenging the notion that polyploid structural changes occur solely in immediate bursts following whole-genome duplication.
This study resolves the long-standing debate over the ancestral angiosperm whole-genome duplication (ε-WGD) by presenting robust structural and phylogenomic evidence from improved Ginkgo genome analysis that confirms a shared tetraploidization event in early angiosperms, thereby refuting recent claims that dismissed the event based on restrictive assumptions.
This study reveals that intensifying drought in a dependent-lineage population of red harvester ants has driven a sharp decline in the rare J1 lineage and altered demographic patterns, suggesting that rapid environmental shifts are reshaping population dynamics faster than natural selection can act on specific phenotypic traits.
This study demonstrates that early life thermal plasticity and adaptive divergence in Arctic charr populations are shaped more by specific historical factors like introductions and management practices than by the current thermal environment, revealing that populations from colder, unmanaged habitats may possess greater resilience to heat stress than those from warmer origins.
This study reveals that human-driven landscape changes in the Amazon have recently caused *Leishmania guyanensis* to diverge into a distinct, genetically isolated population adapted to urban environments, establishing an independent transmission cycle separate from its ancestral sylvatic lineage.
This study investigates the relationship between X-chromosomal diversity and climate, finding mixed results where initial associations with temperature and sex-biased migration were not consistently replicated across different datasets, ultimately leaving the existence of a climatic signal in X-chromosomal diversity unclear.
This study reveals that the slow, time-dependent accumulation of bird species into sympatry following allopatric speciation means that current patterns of species richness are primarily shaped by the age and size of clades rather than just their total diversity.
This study utilizes multidisciplinary morphological and genome-wide SNP analyses to confirm that the geographically disjunct Marbled Toad (*Incilius marmoreus*) populations in Veracruz and the Pacific Coast of Mexico represent a single species with a north-south split occurring approximately 0.86 million years ago, followed by a more recent east-west divergence around 0.33 million years ago likely driven by Late Pleistocene climatic changes.
This paper presents a diffusion-based model demonstrating that under stabilizing selection on a polygenic trait, a persistent deviation of the trait mean from its optimum generates a pervasive, constant intensity of genic selection across loci, while providing a framework to predict macroscopic observables like genetic variance and the dynamics of the trait mean.
This study reveals that the desert-dwelling antelope ground squirrel, despite its hibernator relatives, has undergone a trait reversal characterized by impaired non-shivering thermogenesis and a reliance on metabolically demanding shivering thermogenesis, a finding supported by the first genome assembly and comparative analyses of its thermogenic organs.
Through forward-time simulations, this study demonstrates that the mode of selection (hard vs. soft) fundamentally dictates the scaling relationships between population size, genetic load, and nucleotide diversity, revealing how soft selection decouples neutral diversity from mutational burden and offers a mechanistic explanation for the weak correlation between census size and genetic diversity known as Lewontin's paradox.
This study constructs an operational genotype-phenotype map for influenza hemagglutinin using predicted secondary structure to reveal that protein neutral networks are characterized by strong phenotypic bias, locally structured but globally constrained connectivity, and limited long-range evolvability compared to RNA systems.
By integrating remote homology detection, AlphaFold structural modeling, and functional genetics, this study reveals that Scm3/HJURP orthologs are universally conserved across metazoans despite rapid sequence divergence, overturning the previous belief that they were absent in insects, nematodes, and many vertebrates.
This paper introduces Bvalcalc, a Python-based command-line tool that efficiently calculates genome-wide expected diversity under background selection (B-values) at single base-pair resolution by integrating analytical theory with recombination maps and various biological parameters, and validates its accuracy through simulations and applications to human, fruit fly, and Arabidopsis genomes.
This study challenges the hypothesis that menstruation evolved through expansions in NK cell receptor repertoires by demonstrating that while the KIR gene family experienced intensified selection in menstruating mammals, the overall diversity and size of these receptor families did not increase compared to non-menstruating species.
This study demonstrates that the black-necked crane's rapid recovery from a severe population bottleneck was driven by the genetic purging of strongly deleterious mutations, highlighting a rare positive evolutionary response to demographic collapse while emphasizing the critical need for timely conservation interventions.
By integrating phylogenetic path analysis and multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck models, this study reveals that amniote life-history strategies are shaped by complex, modular coevolutionary pathways where traits like clutch size and frequency evolve independently despite shared fast-slow axes, highlighting the necessity of multivariate approaches to uncover distinct evolutionary tempos and adaptive modes.
This paper introduces a novel stochastic framework based on measure-valued processes to model integrated eco-evolutionary dynamics, revealing that genetic drift fundamentally alters the orientation of the G-matrix by driving genetic correlations to extremes, a finding that challenges conventional wisdom and aligns with empirical observations.
This study finds that, contrary to life-history trade-off theories suggesting a link between reproductive traits and estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer risk, there is no significant genome-wide genetic correlation between the disease and key reproductive life-history traits such as age at menarche, age at first birth, or number of children.