A paternal bias in germline mutation is seen throughout amniotes and may be explained by sex differences in DNA damage and repair after primordial germ cell specification.
The ultimate driver for the substantial between-species difference in the success of transposable elements, the widely distributed genetic parasite, may lie in the overall chromatin environment.
Bacteriophage can rapidly evolve resistance to anti-phage defense elements in bacteria by amplifying latent counter-defense genes, though this amplification comes at a cost of compensatory deletions that eliminate other counter-defense genes.
Analysis of protein interfaces suggests cotranslational assembly can be an adaptive process, likely serving to minimise non-specific interactions with other proteins in the cell.
Yeast populations lose mutational robustness during evolution in one environment but not in another due to the collective effect of a large number of idiosyncratic epistatic interactions.
Henrike Indrischek, Juliane Hammer ... Michael Hiller
Specific evolutionary gene loss signatures indicated an eye-related function for the uncharacterized SERPINE3 gene, which was experimentally confirmed by zebrafish gene knockouts, showing how comparative genomics can provide insights into the function of uncharacterized genes.
