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.
A study on nine *Caenorhabditis elegans* strains demonstrates that natural variation in male frequency fails to predict the magnitude of inbreeding depression or the extent of fitness recovery, indicating that male frequency is a poor proxy for realized outcrossing and its evolutionary benefits.
This study demonstrates that the major life-history locus *six6* drives genotype-by-environment interactions in juvenile rainbow trout, where heterozygous individuals exhibit distinct and steeper growth responses to warming temperatures compared to homozygotes, highlighting the role of standing genetic variation in shaping plasticity to climate change.
By analyzing gene family evolutionary dynamics across 26 pancrustacean orders, this study reveals that independently evolved metamorphic lineages share convergent genomic signatures characterized by the expansion of specific gene families involved in development and moulting, suggesting that moulting serves as a key reservoir for genetic innovation driving life history transitions.
This study demonstrates that relying on ITS and cox1 markers to infer zoonotic infections and recent hybridization between *Schistosoma haematobium* and livestock schistosomes is misleading, as genome sequencing reveals these markers do not accurately reflect the actual low levels of livestock ancestry in human parasites.
This paper argues that local higher-order interactions, detectable through rank-order methods and a new indicator called signed bipyramids, reconcile conflicting findings about the complexity of sequence-fitness relationships in evolutionary processes like antimicrobial resistance.
Through 60 generations of experimental evolution in *Drosophila melanogaster*, this study reveals that prolonged starvation adaptation involves widespread, parallel genomic restructuring centered on mitochondrial pathways and TOR/S6K signaling, with human orthologs of these selected genes showing significant enrichment for differentiated variants in natural populations.
By combining high-throughput sequencing with long-term evolution experiments on bacteriophage ΦX174, researchers discovered that independent populations frequently evolved parallel full-length genomes rather than just single-site mutations, a pattern driven by selection rather than neutrality that significantly biases standard phylodynamic migration analyses.
This study reports the first discovery of UGA stop codon reassignment to tryptophan in the bacterial phylum Actinomycetota, specifically within the family Eggerthellaceae, where genomic evidence from mammalian gut symbionts reveals two independent evolutionary events linked to obligate symbiosis and the proposal of three new genera.
Through experimental evolution and multi-omics analyses, this study demonstrates that the diamondback moth rapidly adapts to contrasting thermal environments via coordinated genetic mutations, epigenetic regulation, and metabolic reprogramming, underscoring its significant resilience to climate change.
This study demonstrates that a conserved gene network involving *hedgehog*, *orthodenticle*, and *odd-paired* regulates anterior head segmentation in both spiders and insects, suggesting an ancient evolutionary origin for this patterning mechanism despite differences in segment composition.