294 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 paper introduces a direct, frequency-based method called "fitness flux" to measure viral adaptation, revealing that SARS-CoV-2 initially adapted rapidly before slowing down while influenza H3N2 maintained a steadier pace, with both viruses' fitness gains aligning with Fisher's fundamental theorem and being largely driven by mutations in the spike protein's receptor-binding domain.
This paper introduces a scalable, homoplasy-based method that leverages the non-modifiability of Cas9-induced mutations to effectively assess the reliability of inferred cell lineage trees, demonstrating superior performance over traditional parsimony scores in distinguishing accurate reconstructions without ground truth.
This paper introduces a novel graph-based measure of ruggedness applicable to sparse datasets, revealing that protein fitness landscapes exhibit localized complexity where dominant biophysical constraints, such as folding and binding, shift.
This study presents the first male germline chromosome-scale genome assemblies for dark-winged fungus gnats, revealing that their germline-restricted chromosomes exhibit extraordinary structural and content dynamism despite being gene-rich and under strong purifying selection, while also providing evidence for satellite-mediated somatic elimination.
By integrating population genomics with field surveys, this study reveals how a Hawaiian parasitoid fly rapidly evolved counter-adaptations to a cricket host's protective silence mutation, demonstrating ongoing arms-race coevolution driven by ancient genomic substrates despite severe genetic bottlenecks.
This study demonstrates that sublethal immune resistance, which impairs parasite growth and virulence without eliminating infection, creates reaction-norm patterns that are mathematically indistinguishable from true tolerance, thereby challenging the validity of using fitness-parasite burden slopes to differentiate between these two host defense strategies.
By analyzing the distribution and regulation of transposable elements across 78 teleost fish species, this study provides an evolutionary genomics framework that confirms the host-transposon relationship as a coevolutionary arms race driven by Red Queen dynamics.
This study utilizes whole genome sequencing to reveal that the invasive avian vampire fly (*Philornis downsi*) colonized the Galapagos Islands via a bottlenecked introduction to San Cristobal, followed by asymmetric, wind- and shipping-mediated dispersal westward to other islands, creating distinct genetic structures that inform targeted control strategies to protect endemic birds.
Using an enhanced version of the Aevol simulator that incorporates realistic genome structures and mutation-rate modifier genes, this study demonstrates that while natural selection systematically drives the evolution of higher replication fidelity, the ultimate mutation rate is constrained by the interplay of genetic drift and the limited supply of beneficial fidelity-improving mutations.
By training machine learning models on bacterial gene content with noise augmentation to improve generalization across evolutionary distances, researchers successfully predicted ancestral phenotypes and concluded that the last bacterial common ancestor was likely an anaerobic, double-membraned, moderately thermophilic organism.