All the characteristic traits of the eukaryotic cell, the basic unit of all macroscopic life, commenced to originate in a prokaryote as means to serve an endosymbiont today known as mitochondria.

The timescale dependence of d_N/d_S in bacteria is better explained by adaptive than purifying dynamics, suggesting comparative genomics can underestimate past adaptation.

Cell biological features are subject to stochastic forces of mutation and random genetic drift, which together cause lineages exposed to identical selection pressures to diverge, and mean phenotypes to deviate from expectations under optimizing selection.

Constraint-based modelling predicts C4 photosynthesis evolves under resource limitation from an ancestral ground state of C3 photosynthesis and attributes divergent metabolic routes in extant C4 subtypes to light.

Theoretical predictions and experiments on multicellular aggregates indicate that the extracellular matrix acts as a mechanical sensor, which regulates cell proliferation and migration in a three-dimensional environment.

Population mutation rates are highly flexible and evolvable under extreme stress conditions, matching changes in selective pressure to avoid extinction of the entire population.

Chromosomal instability of cancer can be quantitatively measured by phylogenetic analysis of 200 tumor cells while using evolutionary principles to account for cellular selection.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes tuberculosis, can evolve rapidly in response to new environments by mutating genetic regulators that control multiple genes at once.

Bacteria growing in biofilms evolve antimicrobial resistance via different pathways and generate greater genetic diversity than well-mixed populations, selecting fitter but less resistant genotypes.