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.
Two new unicellular organisms reveal that coordinated contractions of groups of cells using actomyosin predated animal multicellularity during evolution.
Wild baboons are an excellent model to study complex evolutionary processes such as speciation and hybridization, as well as the links between sociality, longevity and reproductive success.
An ancestral apical brain center contributed to the evolution of the insect central complex requiring foxQ2, which is essential for the development of midline structures of the insect brain.
