294 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 reveals that warning colour variation in the wood tiger moth is governed by independent major-effect loci across sexes and life stages with limited trait associations, suggesting that variable selection rather than genetic correlations maintains the species' colour polymorphisms.
This study reveals that the recovery of the critically endangered Seychelles warbler following a severe population bottleneck was enabled by the selective purging of severe genetic load, which allowed the species to survive despite experiencing significant inbreeding depression driven by a remaining polygenic load of mildly deleterious alleles.
Through adaptive laboratory evolution, the minimal bacterium JCVI-syn3B successfully acquired a genetically encoded ability to grow at low temperatures via mechanisms involving mRNA turnover, DNA stabilization, lipid synthesis, and division protein upregulation, demonstrating that even genomically minimal cells retain substantial evolvability.
This study demonstrates that chronic inflammation (inflammaging) mediates age-related testosterone declines in men as an energy-conserving response to cellular damage, while paradoxically revealing that maintaining high testosterone levels despite such inflammation increases mortality risk.
This study analyzes *Helicobacter pylori* in the admixed Cabo Verdean population to reveal that while bacterial strains reflect historical trans-Atlantic migrations and show signs of host adaptation, their ancestry is uncoupled from host ancestry, offering a unique model for investigating host-pathogen interactions independent of parallel evolutionary history.
Using ultraconserved elements to construct a comprehensive phylogenomic framework, this study reveals that the diversification of early-diverging herichthyine cichlids (*Thorichthys* and *Trichromis*) in the northern Neotropics is driven by the interplay of geological restructuring, climatic oscillations, and ecological pressures, while uncovering unrecognized species diversity, uncertain boundaries, and the first evidence of ghost introgression in these fishes.
This study demonstrates through individual-based simulations that loci under balancing selection facilitate the emergence of pseudo-overdominance by maintaining deleterious mutations and linkage disequilibrium, thereby promoting the evolution of recombination suppression to prevent the production of unfit homozygous recombinant offspring.
The paper introduces AmpliPhy, an open-source pipeline that improves phylogenetic reconstruction of protein families by enriching multiple sequence alignments with homologous sequences, which significantly enhances tree accuracy and root placement while having minimal impact on alignment quality.
This study applies a specialized quantitative genetics framework to analyze lifetime growth curves in the common lizard (*Zootoca vivipara*), revealing that genetic variation in the shape of growth trajectories—rather than just intrinsic size—drives adaptive potential, with distinct patterns observed across wild and mesocosm populations and between sexes.
This study establishes a strong linear relationship between the complexity of viral genetic information processing and viral diversity, demonstrating that viruses with simpler propagation strategies consistently exhibit greater diversification across taxonomic levels and time.