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.
By leveraging the self-fertilizing mangrove rivulus (*Kryptolebias marmoratus*) to eliminate genetic variation, this study demonstrates that DNA methylation levels at 40 specific CpG sites predict chronological age with high accuracy, establishing a powerful model for isolating epigenetic aging from genetic effects.
This study employs a stochastic spatial model and global sensitivity analysis to evaluate how organism dispersal and payload fitness costs influence the probability of failure and spatial confinement of gene drives, revealing significant variability in drive performance that informs their suitability for specific applications.
This study identifies and characterizes a conserved allatostatin C neuropeptide system in the octopus *Octopus vulgaris*, revealing a single peptide that differentially activates two distinct receptors with broad tissue distribution, suggesting a critical role in sensory processing and nociception with significant implications for cephalopod welfare.
This study demonstrates that despite habitat degradation altering pollinator interactions, male-biased sexual selection persists in the dioecious plant *Silene dioica*, with anthropogenic environments specifically intensifying selection on male floral traits while maintaining consistent selection on female fertility-related traits.
This study demonstrates that independently cold-adapted PACMAD grasses exhibit a constrained, conserved protein-level response to freezing, particularly through the retention and structural optimization of LEA3 proteins, suggesting that functional freezing tolerance relies on ancestral protective mechanisms rather than lineage-specific innovations.
This study utilizes ancient metagenomic analysis of dental calculus from Pleistocene and modern reindeer to reconstruct their oral and digestive microbiomes and diets, revealing both long-term continuity in rumen adaptations and spatio-temporal shifts in microbial and dietary profiles driven by ecological differences between ancient France and contemporary Scandinavia.
This paper introduces DDGeoSSE, a deep learning-based generative model that enables the estimation of diversity-dependent biogeographic rates and reveals how local species richness shapes diversification dynamics in Caribbean Anolis lizards and Viburnum plants.
This study analyzes 33 barn owl parent-offspring trios to establish a mutation rate of 5.6 x 10⁻⁹, revealing that fathers transmit twice as many mutations as mothers and that paternal age significantly increases mutation rates, providing direct evidence of germline senescence in birds.
This study demonstrates that machine learning models trained on raw genotype data do not outperform traditional summary statistics in inferring the time to fixation of hard selective sweeps, suggesting that few undiscovered signals remain in single-population genomic data for distinguishing sweep timing from sweep age.
TriMouNet is a novel algorithm that infers level-1 phylogenetic networks from multi-locus gene tree distributions by statistically selecting best-fitting trinets to assemble a full network, thereby outperforming concatenation-based methods like TriLoNet in accurately identifying reticulations while minimizing false positives.