Browse our latest Evolutionary Biology articles

The hagfish slime glands, which produce a large volume of defensive slime within 0.4 s by ejecting threads and mucus into seawater, evolved from cells and genes expressed in the skin.

A new screening strategy for divergent homologs of insect odorant and gustatory receptors, based upon predicted three-dimensional structural similarity, unexpectedly identifies candidates in humans.

An anti-influenza receptor binding site antibody acquires breadth through hierarchical sets of epistatic mutations distributed across the light and heavy chains, demonstrating how mutations can interact to shape the evolution of antibody breadth in various antigen exposure regimens.

The mushroom body neuropils of the larval brain have regions that share neurons and functions with the adult and larval-specific regions built with 'doomed' neurons or cells that trans-differentiate for temporary larval function before assuming their adult phenotypes at metamorphosis.

The way neurons in the brain rewire in larvae as they turn to adult fruit flies sheds light on how complete metamorphosis was ‘invented’ over the course of evolution.

The behavioral ability of mice and treeshrews to detect visual figures is highly texture dependent, unlike that of primates including macaques and mouse lemurs, and neural responses to figures in mouse visual cortex are similarly texture dependent.

Manipulation of the E. coli translation machinery sheds new light on evolutionary constraints and optimization strategies for bacterial translation and growth.

Life is constrained in its sampling of protein sequence space to catalyze one of the most energetically challenging biochemical reactions.

Longstanding eco-evolutionary theories are tested using shotgun metagenomic data from the human gut microbiome, showing links between community diversity and the evolutionary trajectory of a focal species within the community.

Baltic and Arctic ecotypes of the marine midge Clunio emerged from a recent adaptive radiation, which is based on standing genetic variation at many loci involved in time-keeping and nervous system development.