337 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.
By analyzing genomic data from six major European forest tree species, this study demonstrates that historical demographic factors, particularly genetic isolation and limited gene flow, increase population vulnerability to climate change by reducing adaptive potential, elevating genetic load, and hindering optimal climate adaptation.
This paper introduces a novel method that leverages time-lagged F2 statistics and linear regression on ancient DNA time-series data to infer directional migration rates and reconstruct dynamic pan-European migration networks over the last 6,000 years.
This study demonstrates that experimental evolution of yeast reveals a trade-off between fitness in early versus late stationary phase, where adaptive mutations improve performance in one phase at the expense of the other, while longer stationary intervals drive distinct evolutionary routes and larger fitness effects.
This study demonstrates that in the spider mite *Tetranychus cinnabarinus*, genetic variation drives a trade-off where genotypes with higher intrinsic growth rates are more sensitive to food competition but exert stronger reproductive interference on heterospecifics, highlighting the importance of genetic correlations across trophic and sexual traits in species interactions.
This study combines theoretical modeling and empirical data from eight populations to demonstrate that while the Fraternal Birth Order Effect is robustly supported, the observed Sororal Birth Order Effect and higher prevalence of male same-sex orientation among only-children suggest that maternal miscarriages and potentially additional mechanisms beyond the Maternal Immune Hypothesis play a significant role in the development of male sexual orientation.
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 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.