Browse our latest Evolutionary Biology articles

New complex traits can evolve through the elimination of genes in multiple unrelated pathways, rather than through the creation of new gene functions.

Parallel horizontal gene transfer has spread a bacteriolytic gene family to all domains of life, and has bestowed a niche-transcending adaptation in recipients that must deploy antibacterial molecules to survive in a bacterial world.

Reconstructing ancestral enzymes has revealed that a switch in kinase substrate preference evolved via an expanded specificity intermediate that is tolerated in vivo, thus providing a path for kinase diversification.

A general method for inferring fitness from a sample of nucleotide sequences can predict the progenitor of next year's seasonal influenza.

Embryos of distantly related sea squirt species are nearly identical but develop according to different gene regulatory mechanisms.

Ribosome profiling data from several eukaryotic species provides strong evidence that many long non-coding RNA molecules encode novel short proteins.

Deep mutational scanning was used to comprehensively quantify the effects of mutations to influenza hemagglutinin and shows that the virus possesses a high inherent mutational tolerance at key antigenic sites.