Evolutionary trade-offs enhance efficacy of antibiotic therapy by constraining bacterial adaptation in dependence of drug order and trade-off effect size.
Torsten M Scheyer, John R Hutchinson ... Marcelo R Sánchez-Villagra
The giant caiman Purussaurus from the Miocene of Venezuela is the first recorded member of crown Crocodylia having three sacrals, thus breaking the otherwise strict vertebral constraint of the group.
Jessica E Thomas, Gary R Carvalho ... Michael Knapp
Reconstruction of great auk population dynamics suggests that hunting pressure alone could have been responsible for their extinction, demonstrating that even abundant, widespread species can be vulnerable to intense exploitation.
In Thermoplasma acidophilum, an archaeon without histones, a DNA-binding protein acquired from bacteria via horizontal gene transfer mediates histone-like chromatin architecture.
Phenotypic evolution can originate from variations in very precocious developmental events, starting even before fecundation, during the fabrication of the egg in the mother's gonad.
Contrary to intuition that the evolutionary fate of mutation rate modifying alleles is frequency-dependent, neither the strength nor the sign of selection on modifiers depends on initial frequency.
Escherichia coli is surprisingly tolerant to chromatinization by archaeal histones, suggesting that histones can become established as ubiquitous chromatin proteins without interfering critically with some key DNA-templated processes.
Omaya Dudin, Andrej Ondracka ... Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo
Cellularization in Sphaeroforma arctica generates a self-organized structure that morphologically resembles an epithelium, and is associated with tightly regulated expression of cell adhesion pathways.
Evolutionary loss of foot muscle in a bipedal rodent shares similarities with skeletal muscle atrophy, which is typically considered a pathological response to injury or disease.
