399 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 study demonstrates that laboratory-maintained strains of *Drosophila sechellia* retain a high degree of similarity to wild populations across various behavioral and anatomical phenotypes, suggesting that laboratory models remain valid for studying the molecular basis of the species' ecological specialization.
The authors developed a Bayesian multilevel framework for longitudinal RB-TnSeq to resolve time-dependent fitness effects in *E. coli*, uncovering how shifting environmental constraints and trade-offs shape genome-wide fitness landscapes and predict long-term evolutionary outcomes.
This study demonstrates that *Hymenoscyphus fraxineus* has undergone local adaptation during its southward spread in Europe, with Italian populations exhibiting greater plasticity and maintained aggressiveness under higher temperatures and different host species compared to northern populations.
This paper describes a moving average smoothing method for extracting obliquity cycles from fossil time series data, demonstrating its ability to improve mean trait predictions for 10-million-year-old stickleback fish while noting that its applicability depends on the specific dynamics of the data.
This study reveals that in the Bells Vireo, fine-scale riparian dispersal corridors within a desert contact zone drive asymmetric, neutral genome-wide admixture between eastern and western lineages, creating a unique discontinuous genetic pattern rather than evidence of local adaptation.
The paper introduces the Structural History of Eukarya (SHE), a massive phylogeny based on 300 trillion protein-protein structural alignments that reveals a bipartite model of eukaryotic evolution, identifies lineage-specific structural accelerations, and establishes a quantitative framework for assessing proteome quality and selecting model organisms.
This paper introduces the concept of "latent load" from positively selected sites, arguing that it significantly exceeds traditional genetic loads in humans and suggesting that macroevolutionary processes may drive mutation rates toward a population-optimal value where latent and mutational loads are balanced.
This study of wild chimpanzees reveals that while strong social bonds are associated with lower stress levels (cortisol) in females, they paradoxically predict higher stress levels in males, challenging the assumption that social bonds universally confer health benefits across different sexes and social structures.
This study uses 3D-printed bird models across island and mainland environments to demonstrate that while higher predation risk on the mainland selects against conspicuous plumage, reduced predation pressure on islands does not fully explain the evolution of less colorful island bird plumage, suggesting other ecological and evolutionary factors are at play.
By integrating genome assembly, transcriptomics, and epigenomic profiling in *Cameraria ohridella*, this study reveals that ancestral and neo-sex chromosome regions employ distinct dosage compensation mechanisms—repression via H4K16ac depletion on the ancestral Z versus upregulation via H4K16ac enrichment on the neo-Z—suggesting that neo-sex chromosomes often evolve novel, *Drosophila*-like compensation strategies rather than co-opting existing ancestral mechanisms.