389 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 applying a novel polymorphism-based method to Drosophila melanogaster, this study demonstrates that weak natural selection acts on synonymous codon changes to optimize codon usage, mRNA stability, and expression levels, a conclusion validated by the convergence of multiple independent lines of evidence.
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.
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.
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.
By analyzing 47,000 global *Klebsiella pneumoniae* genomes and applying hypercubic transition path sampling, this study maps and predicts the diverse evolutionary pathways of antimicrobial resistance, revealing how drug policies and public health contexts drive both consistent and divergent resistance patterns across countries.
This paper demonstrates that the exponential growth of evolutionary lineages creates a geometric packing problem that forces the Tree of Life to embed into a hyperbolic manifold with a universal dimension of approximately 2 and a specific curvature determined by the genetic code's information rate, a prediction rigorously confirmed across diverse biological datasets and protein alphabets.
This study reveals that *Varroa destructor* mites associated with varroa-resistant honey bee colonies across Europe consistently exhibit a significant reduction in body size compared to those from non-resistant colonies, suggesting a host-driven phenotypic shift that could serve as a new selection marker for breeding resistant bees.
This paper proposes that Neandertals originated from a sex-biased range expansion of modern humans utilizing Levallois tools between 400 and 250 ka, which resulted in massive introgression with local archaic populations in Europe to create a distinct lineage while simultaneously explaining shared genetic markers and tool technologies.
This study analyzes six years of SARS-CoV-2 genomic data to demonstrate that shifts in mutational fitness costs across evolving variants are largely driven by pairwise epistatic interactions between new mutations and the distinct genetic backgrounds of those variants.
This study introduces a high-throughput platform for characterizing full-length human proteins on native cells to reveal how conformation-mediated epistasis resolves multidimensional biophysical trade-offs, thereby constraining antibody evolutionary trajectories to specific mutational orders that enable the acquisition of diverse antigen recognition without compromising folding or self-reactivity.