📄 Category

evolutionary biology

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.

📄 evolutionary biology

The limits of information in precise regulation of early multicellular life cycles

This study demonstrates that while intrinsic information sources like mechanical stress and cell age can facilitate the evolution of early multicellular life cycles, they face inherent trade-offs between flexibility and regularity that significantly limit the ability of nascent organisms to evolve tightly regulated and diverse reproductive strategies without further evolutionary innovations.

Libby, E., Isaksson, H., Ratcliff, W.2026-03-20
📄 evolutionary biology

Influenza hemagglutinin subtypes have different sequence constraints despite sharing extremely similar structures

Despite sharing highly conserved structures and functions, influenza hemagglutinin subtypes exhibit significantly divergent sequence constraints, with approximately half of their sites showing distinct amino acid preferences driven by differences in buried residues and rewired local interactions.

Ahn, J. J., Yu, T. C., Dadonaite, B., Radford, C. E., Bloom, J. D.2026-03-18
📄 evolutionary biology

A New Information Theoretic Approach Shows that Mixture Models Outperform Partitioned Models for Phylogenetic Analyses of Amino Acid Data

By applying the newly introduced marginal Akaike information criterion (mAIC) to diverse empirical datasets, this study demonstrates that mixture models universally outperform partitioned models for phylogenetic analyses of amino acid data, highlighting the importance of further developing mixture models for accurate evolutionary inference.

Ren, H., Jiang, C., Wong, T. K. F., Shao, Y., Susko, E., Minh, B. Q., Lanfear, R.2026-03-18
📄 evolutionary biology

Rapid and repeated evolution of myosin copy number in threespine stickleback

This study demonstrates that threespine sticklebacks have rapidly and repeatedly evolved adaptive expansions of the *MYH3C* gene family on their sex chromosome through tandem duplications, resulting in increased muscle gene expression and distinct ecological divergence between freshwater and marine populations.

Yoxsimer, A. M., Daugherty, R. R., Hare, E. E., Chan, Y. F., Jones, F. C., Roberts Kingman, G. A., Offenberg, E. G., How (…)2026-03-17
📄 evolutionary biology

Transcriptional signatures underlying divergent lifestyles of endophytic and pathogenic fungi in early colonisation of wheat roots

This study characterizes the divergent early transcriptional signatures of the wheat pathogen *Gaeumannomyces tritici* and its protective endophyte relative *G. hyphopodioides*, revealing that the endophyte undergoes significant reprogramming and stress responses linked to vesicle formation and effector upregulation, while the pathogen employs a stealthy strategy of gene downregulation and lignin degradation to evade host defenses.

Moren-Rosado, S., Hill, R., Chancellor, T., Rusholme-Pilcher, R., Hall, N., Hammond-Kosack, K. E., McMullan, M.2026-03-17
📄 evolutionary biology

Alternative splicing of a TPR domain determines mitochondrial versus plastid function of the only CLU family protein in Marchantia polymorpha

This study demonstrates that in the liverwort *Marchantia polymorpha*, alternative splicing of a single exon alters the C-terminal TPR domain configuration of the sole CLU family protein, thereby determining its specific targeting to either mitochondria or plastids and compensating for the loss of gene duplication through genome reformatting.

Lozano-Quiles, M., Raval, P. K., Gould, S. B.2026-03-16
📄 evolutionary biology

Sexual selection purges mutation load, but not overall genetic diversity in populations, decreasing vulnerability to extinction

This study provides the first direct genomic evidence that strong sexual selection in *Tribolium castaneum* populations effectively purges deleterious mutations and reduces extinction risk without eroding overall genetic diversity, thereby enhancing population viability.

Pointer, M. D., Nash, W. J., Chapman, T., Maklakov, A. A., Richardson, D. S.2026-03-16
📄 evolutionary biology

Evolutionary dynamics under phenotypic uncertainty

This paper introduces Probabilistic Phenotype Genetics (ProP Gen), a new theoretical framework and simulation algorithm that revises classical evolutionary dynamics by incorporating ubiquitous phenotypic uncertainty, revealing novel mechanisms like "phenotypic buoying" and accelerated valley crossing that better explain complex biological phenomena such as bacterial persistence and cancer treatment evasion.

Mohanty, V., Sappington, A., Shakhnovich, E., Berger, B.2026-03-16