Aashiq H Kachroo, Jon M Laurent ... Edward M Marcotte
Despite billions of years of divergence, a majority of prokaryotic genes can functionally replace their essential eukaryotic counterparts, revealing broad preservation of ancestral functions and identifying heme biosynthesis as a near-universally swappable pathway.
The Atlantic herring has the lowest mutation rate yet estimated in a vertebrate species and this partially explains its moderate nucleotide diversity given the large population size.
An in silico reconstruction of a chloroplast that existed hundreds of millions of years ago casts new insights in the evolutionary processes, endosymbioses and chimerism events that shape the origin of plastids.
The phosphate starvation response network in a commensal yeast evolved to expand its downstream targets via changes in the main transcription factor's dependence on its co-activator, potentially altering the physiological response.
Donato Giovannelli, Stefan M Sievert ... Costantino Vetriani
The genome of Thermovibrio ammonificans encodes ancestral pathways (e.g., hydrogen oxidation) and more recently acquired ones (e.g., nitrate reduction) and a hybrid pathway for CO2 fixation.
Experimental evolution shows that when selection acts on two traits constrained by a trade-off, the direction of phenotypic evolution depends on the environment.
Heritable mutations tend to occur within different DNA sequence contexts in different human populations, suggesting that DNA replication and repair often change in efficacy over only a few hundred generations of evolution.
