The sea anemone Nematostella vectensis (Anthozoa, Cnidaria) is a powerful model system for characterizing the evolution of genes functioning in venom and nervous systems. Despite being an example for evolutionary novelty, the evolutionary origin of most toxins remains unknown. Here we report the first bona fide case of protein recruitment from the cnidarian nervous to venom system. The ShK-like1 peptide has ShKT cysteine motif, is lethal for fish larvae and packaged into nematocysts, the cnidarian...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
Altruistic social interactions generally evolve between genetically related individuals or other replicators, whereas sexual interactions usually occur among unrelated individuals. This tension between social and sexual interactions is resolved by policing mechanisms enforcing cooperation among genetically unrelated entities. For example, most organisms with two haploid genomes are diploid, both genomes encapsulated inside a single nuclear envelope. A fascinating exception to this are Basidiomycete...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
Light represents a key environmental factor, which shapes the physiology and evolution of most organisms. Notable illustrations of this are reef-building corals (Anthozoa), which adapted to shallow, oligotrophic, tropical oceans by exploiting light from the sun and the moon to regulate various aspects of physiology including sexual reproduction, phototaxis and photosymbiosis. Together with the Medusozoa, (including jellyfish), the Anthozoa constitute the ancestral metazoan phylum cnidaria. While...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
Endosymbionts and intracellular parasites are common in arthropods and other invertebrate hosts. As a consequence, (co)amplification of untargeted bacterial sequences has been occasionally reported as a common problem in DNA barcoding. The bacterial genus Rickettsia belongs to the order Rickettsiales and consists of two lineages: one including diverse pathogens infecting arthropod hosts, the other consisting of non-pathogenic species with a broader host taxonomic range. While discriminating among...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
Selective sweeps are thought to play a significant role in shaping patterns of variability across genomes; accurate predictions of their effects are, therefore, important for understanding these patterns. A commonly used model of selective sweeps assumes that coalescent events that occur during a sweep can be neglected, leading to simple expressions for the effects of sweeps on pairwise nucleotide site diversities and site frequency spectra. It is shown here that there is a significant probability...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
Some have hypothesized that ancestral proteins were, on average, less specific than their descendants. If true, this would provide a universal axis along which to organize protein evolution and suggests that reconstructed ancestral proteins may be uniquely powerful tools for protein engineering. Ancestral sequence reconstruction studies are one line of evidence used to support this hypothesis. Previously, we performed such a study, investigating the evolution of peptide binding specificity for the...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
Premise of the study: New sequencing technologies enable the possibility of generating large-scale molecular datasets for constructing the plant tree of life. We describe a new probe set for target enrichment sequencing to generate nuclear sequence data to build phylogenetic trees with any flagellate plants, comprising hornworts, liverworts, mosses, lycophytes, ferns, and gymnosperms. Methods and Results: We leveraged existing transcriptome and genome sequence data to design a set of 56,989 probes...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
Inbreeding depression is a phenomenon of long-standing importance, but we know surprisingly little about its genetic architecture, precise effects and life-history dynamics in wild populations. Here, we combined 417K imputed SNP genotypes for 5952 wild Soay sheep with detailed long-term life-history data to explore inbreeding depression on a key fitness component, annual survival. Inbreeding manifests in long runs of homozygosity (ROH) and these are abundant in Soay sheep, covering on average 24%...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
Over the last few years, matching habitat choice has gained attention as a mechanism for maintaining biodiversity and driving speciation. It revolves around the idea that individuals select the habitat in which they perceive to obtain greater fitness after a prior evaluation of their local performance across heterogeneous environments. This results in individuals with similar ecological traits converging to the same patches, and hence could indirectly cause assortative mating when mating occurs in...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
Combination therapies have shown remarkable success in preventing the evolution of resistance to multiple drugs, including HIV, tuberculosis, and cancer. Nevertheless, the rise in drug resistance still remains an important challenge. The capability to accurately predict the emergence of resistance, either to one or multiple drugs, may help to improve treatment options. Existing theoretical approaches often focus on exponential growth laws, which may not be realistic when scarce resources and competition...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
There is increased awareness of the possibility of developmental memories resulting from evolutionary learning. Genetic regulatory and neural networks can be modelled by analogous formalism raising the important question of productive analogies in principles, processes and performance. We investigate the formation and persistence of various developmental memories of past phenotypes asking how the number of remembered past phenotypes scales with network size, to what extent memories stored form by...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
Background: Lateral gene transfer (LGT) has been documented in a broad range of eukaryotes, where it can promote adaptation. In plants, LGT of functional nuclear genes has been repeatedly reported in parasitic plants, ferns and grasses, but the exact extent of the phenomenon remains unknown. Systematic studies are now needed to identify the factors that govern the frequency of LGT among plants. Results: Here we scan the genomes of a diverse set of grass species that span more than 50 million years...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
We developed a panel of 44 nuclear genetic markers and applied this to two species of marbled newts in the north (Triturus marmoratus) and the south (T. pygmaeus) of the Iberian Peninsula, to document pattern and process of interspecific gene flow. The northernmost occurrence of T. pygmaeus genetic material was in a T. marmoratus population north of the Vouga river estuary. This suggested the past presence of a hybrid zone, possibly coinciding with a natural river outlet at ca. 1200 A.D. Since 1808,...
Sat May 30, 2020 03:00
In their manuscript entitled "No support for the adaptive hypothesis of lagging-strand encoding in bacterial genomes", Liu and Zhang attempt to refute the findings of our 2018 Nature Communications paper. Here, we demonstrate that multiple key claims made by Liu and Zhang are factually incorrect, and that their overall conclusions, including the title of their paper, are invalid. We show that multiple existing controls already preclude the null hypothesis proposed by Liu and Zhang. We also show that...
Fri May 29, 2020 03:00
The wing patterns of butterflies are an excellent system with which to study phenotypic evolution. The incredibly diverse patterns are generated from an array of pigmented scales on a largely two dimensional surface, resulting in a visibly tractable system for studying the evolution of pigmentation. In Heliconius butterflies, much of this diversity is controlled by a few genes of large effect that regulate pattern switches between races and species across a large mimetic radiation. One of these genes,...
Fri May 29, 2020 03:00
RNA viruses are proficient at switching to novel host species due to their fast mutation rates. Implicit in this assumption is the need to evolve adaptations in the new host species to exploit their cells efficiently. However, SARS-CoV-2 has required no significant adaptation to humans since the pandemic began, with no observed selective sweeps to date. Here we contrast the role of positive selection and recombination in the Sarbecoviruses in horseshoe bats to SARS-CoV-2 evolution in humans. While...
Fri May 29, 2020 03:00
The Kingman coalescent and its developments are often considered among the most important advances in population genetics of the last decades. Demographic inference based on coalescent theory has been used to reconstruct the population dynamics and evolutionary history of several species, including Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB), an important human pathogen causing tuberculosis. One key assumption of the Kingman coalescent is that the number of descendants of different individuals does not vary...
Sun May 31, 2020 03:00
The human body is exceptional for many reasons, not the least of which is the wide variety of movements it is capable of executing. Because our species is able to execute so many discrete activities, researchers often disagree on which were the movements most essential to the evolution of our species. This paper continues a recently introduced analysis, that the performance gap between female and male athletes narrows in sports which most reflect movements humans evolved to do. Here, I examine the...
Fri May 29, 2020 03:00
AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWBirth-death processes have given biologists a model-based framework to answer questions about changes in the birth and death rates of lineages in a phylogenetic tree. Therefore birth-death models are central to macroevolutionary as well as phylodynamic analyses. Early approaches to studying temporal variation in birth and death rates using birth-death models faced difficulties due to the restrictive choices of birth and death rate curves through time. Sufficiently flexible...
Sun May 31, 2020 03:00
Dietary restriction (DR) is a key focus in ageing research. Specific conditions and genotypes were recently found to negate lifespan extension by DR, questioning its universal relevance. However, the conceptual framework of dietary reaction norms explains why DRs effects might not be apparent in some situations. We tested comprehensively the importance of dietary reaction norms by measuring longevity and fecundity on five diets in five genotypes, with and without water supplementation in the fly...
Thu May 28, 2020 03:00
Sex chromosomes are typically comprised of a non-recombining region and a recombining pseudoautosomal region. Accurately quantifying the relative size of these regions is critical for sex chromosome biology both from a functional (i.e. number of sex-linked genes) and evolutionary perspective (i.e. extent of Y degeneration and X-Y heteromorphy). The evolution of the pseudoautosomal boundary (PAB) - the limit between the recombining and the non-recombining regions of the sex chromosomes - is well documented...
Thu May 28, 2020 03:00
Publication date: August 2020Source: Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Volume 63Author(s): Leena A Ibrahim, Ben Schuman, Rachel Bandler, Bernardo Rudy, Gord Fishell
Sun May 31, 2020 18:43
Publication date: October 2020Source: Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Volume 64Author(s): Richard Bertram, Richard L Hyson, Amanda J Brunick, Diana Flores, Frank Johnson
Fri May 29, 2020 14:39
Publication date: Available online 30 May 2020Source: Revue des Maladies RespiratoiresAuthor(s): M. Gazzola, N. Flamand, Y. Bossé
Sun May 31, 2020 18:39
Publication date: Available online 29 May 2020Source: Revue des Maladies RespiratoiresAuthor(s): P. Thoré, F. Arboit, A. Seferian, J. Perrin, D. Montani
Sat May 30, 2020 16:51
Publication date: Available online 30 May 2020Source: International Journal of Pediatric OtorhinolaryngologyAuthor(s): Sudha Lakshmi Arulalan, Senthil Vadivu, Sandhya Dharmarajan, Dr. Ruchima Dham, Mohan Kameswaran
Sun May 31, 2020 18:35
Publication date: Available online 30 May 2020Source: International Journal of Pediatric OtorhinolaryngologyAuthor(s): Uyttebroek Saartje, Poelmans Michelle, Casteels Ingele, De Vleeschouwer Steven, Vermeulen François, Jorissen Mark, Van Gerven Laura
Sun May 31, 2020 18:35
Publication date: Available online 30 May 2020Source: International Journal of Pediatric OtorhinolaryngologyAuthor(s): Rana A. Alkhamra, Sana M.N. Abu-Dahab
Sun May 31, 2020 18:35
Publication date: Available online 29 May 2020Source: International Journal of Pediatric OtorhinolaryngologyAuthor(s): Andrew J. Redmann, Matthew Smith, Dan Benscoter, Catherine K. Hart
Fri May 29, 2020 15:11
Publication date: Available online 28 May 2020Source: International Journal of Pediatric OtorhinolaryngologyAuthor(s): Kun Yang, Zhiqi Liu
Fri May 29, 2020 15:11
Publication date: Available online 30 May 2020Source: CortexAuthor(s): Giada Dirupo, Corrado Corradi-Dell’Acqua, Maha Kashef, Martin Debbané, Deborah Badoud
Sun May 31, 2020 18:32
Publication date: Available online 30 May 2020Source: CortexAuthor(s): Xuejiao Dou, Hongxiang Yao, Feng Feng, Pan Wang, Bo Zhou, Dan Jin, Zhengyi Yang, Jin Li, Cui Zhao, Luning Wang, Ningyu An, Bing Liu, Xi Zhang, Yong Liu
Sun May 31, 2020 18:32
Publication date: Available online 28 May 2020Source: CortexAuthor(s): Eline van Petersen, Mareike Altgassen, Rob van Lier, Tessa M. van Leeuwen
Fri May 29, 2020 17:50
Publication date: Available online 30 May 2020Source: Oral Surgery, Oral Medicine, Oral Pathology and Oral RadiologyAuthor(s): Nancy Zhu, Alexander Cruz Walma, Maria J. Troulis, Meredith August
Sun May 31, 2020 18:30
Publication date: Available online 30 May 2020Source: Oral Surgery, Oral Medicine, Oral Pathology and Oral RadiologyAuthor(s): Kevin C. Lee, Sung-Kiang Chuang
Sun May 31, 2020 18:30
Publication date: Available online 29 May 2020Source: Oral Surgery, Oral Medicine, Oral Pathology and Oral RadiologyAuthor(s): Thaís dos Santos Fontes Pereira, Bruno Augusto Benevenuto de Andrade, Mário José Romañach, Núbia Braga Pereira, Carolina Cavaliere Gomes, Bruno Augusto Linhares Almeida Mariz, Oslei Paes de Almeida, Michelle Agostini, Willie F.P. van Heerden, Roman Carlos, Ricardo Santiago Gomez, Felipe Paiva Fonseca
Sat May 30, 2020 13:19
The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence, antibiotic resistance and certain virulence genes of the most predominant bacterial pathogens causing BRD. A total of 225 calves; 55 apparently heal...
Fri May 29, 2020 03:00
Both steatosis and inflammation are key pathological events in the progression of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Probiotics are beneficial for the prevention and treatment of NAFLD. Bifidobacterium an...
Fri May 29, 2020 03:00
During cheese ripening, the bacterial strain Pediococcus acidilactici FAM18098 produces the non-proteinogenic amino acid, α-aminobutyrate (AABA). The metabolic processes that lead to the biosynthesis of this comp...
Fri May 29, 2020 03:00
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