451 papers
By resurrecting extinct mammalian lactoferrin ancestors, this study reveals how the cryptic antimicrobial peptide lactoferricin gradually evolved from a membrane-rupturing domain into a potent bactericidal agent through the stepwise enrichment of specific amino acids and recent natural selection, particularly at a key site in great apes.
Phylo-Movies is a browser-based and standalone tool that animates topological differences between consecutive phylogenetic trees from sliding-window analyses to visualize lineage migrations and resolve phylogenetic conflicts, such as recombination breakpoints and rogue taxa.
This paper introduces a unified two-sex Wright-Fisher model that integrates diffusion approximations to analyze how Y chromosome-specific features, such as reduced effective population size and non-recombination, influence both the fixation probabilities and segregation times of mutations, revealing that overdominant mutations are more likely to fix on the Y chromosome than on autosomes within observable time windows.
This study reveals that in variationally modular organisms, evolution is constrained by a "module-selection balance" where traits improve at equal rates rather than following the fitness gradient, a phenomenon supported by theoretical models and empirical data from *E. coli* long-term evolution experiments.
This study utilizes 3D geometric morphometrics to demonstrate that the unusually large threespine stickleback population in Sarita Lake, British Columbia, exhibits distinct allometric growth patterns and morphological traits—such as expanded skulls and robust pelvic armor—driven by a complex interplay of fecundity selection, limnetic trophic niche adaptation, and predation pressure.
This study demonstrates that inhibiting HSP90 in *Tribolium castaneum* releases a reduced-eye phenotype that alters light perception and behavior, providing the first evidence that HSP90-mediated evolutionary capacitance can generate beneficial behavioral adaptations to environmental stress.
This study presents a comprehensive, living database of genetic paternity across 52 primate species and uses Bayesian modeling to demonstrate that while phylogeny has a modest influence, group composition is the strongest predictor of primary male paternity success, revealing a complex relationship between social organization and reproductive outcomes that challenges simple categorical predictions.
By employing a novel phylogenetic approach to model latency, this study provides evidence that Ebola virus persists in its reservoir through extended periods of quiescence lasting potentially decades, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of its evolutionary history and geographic spread in Central Africa.
This paper introduces a new measure of phylogenetic information content to demonstrate that while increasing data volume generally improves species tree inference, subsampling to include only the most informative loci can yield better results when the overall dataset contains uninformative data.
This study quantifies how mating dispersal in the lesser horseshoe bat decorrelates gene and individual flows by separately estimating natal and mating dispersal distances, revealing that while mating dispersal averages 11 km, the combined gametic dispersal follows a fat-tailed distribution with a mean of 20 km, thereby explaining the species' fine-scale genetic structure.
This study demonstrates that the Wnt/β-catenin destruction complex was functional in the cnidarian *Nematostella vectensis* through low-affinity interactions mediated by ancestral Axin-RGS motifs, revealing how motif duplication and subsequent affinity optimization drove the evolution of this critical signaling module in the metazoan lineage.
This study reveals that despite sharing recent genomic acquisitions, modern humans and Neanderthals represent distinct populations of a common species that independently accumulated functional mutations and cultural innovations, with key modern human-specific variants failing to introgress into Neanderthals likely due to niche exclusivity or demographic constraints.
This study demonstrates that nitrogen-fixing rhizobia harbor genetic variation influencing host resistance and mutualism robustness against parasitic nematodes, suggesting that nutritional mutualists can significantly shape the evolutionary potential of host defense traits.
This paper demonstrates that in a subdivided population under stabilizing selection, a critical migration threshold exists where genic variance is maximized and the genetic basis of trait variation across subpopulations is most similar, a phenomenon accurately predicted by an analytical mean-field approach using effective parameters.
This study reveals that H5N1 influenza viruses (genotypes B3.13 and D1.1) spilled over from wild birds into US dairy cattle in late 2023 and 2024, respectively, followed by cryptic transmission and accelerated evolution driven by relaxed purifying selection and positive selection for adaptation, highlighting the urgent need for intensified genomic surveillance to mitigate human emergence risks.
This paper establishes a theoretical framework demonstrating that while phylogenetic signal and bias accumulate linearly with data size, stochastic noise accumulates nonlinearly, revealing that genome-scale datasets may still fail to resolve deep or rapid divergences when noise overwhelms signal or when systematic bias continuously outpaces signal accumulation.
This study investigates recently diverged *Petunia* lineages using integrative phylogenomic and population genetic approaches to demonstrate that pervasive gene flow and incomplete lineage sorting create a speciation continuum where traditional tree-based models fail, ultimately revealing that only four lineages qualify as distinct species while the others represent ongoing divergence within a reticulate evolutionary framework.
This study reconstructs the most comprehensive plastid-based phylogenomic framework for the hyperdiverse orchid genus *Bulbophyllum* using 63 genes from 355 specimens, revealing five major evolutionary lineages and resolving previously unclear relationships within the Asian clade to provide a foundation for future taxonomic revision.
In a pollinator-free common garden, wild woodland strawberry (*Fragaria vesca*) genotypes exhibit a geographic trade-off in reproductive assurance strategies, with southern European populations favoring self-fertilization and eastern populations relying more on clonal reproduction, both associated with reduced petal size.
This study presents the first range-wide genomic analysis of the eastern oyster (*Crassostrea virginica*), revealing distinct Gulf and Atlantic ancestral clusters, unexpected human-mediated genetic mixing, and climate-adaptive loci to inform future aquaculture breeding programs.