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Experimental evolution in engineered Escherichia coli shows that amplification-mediated gene expression tuning, resulting from intrinsic instability of copy-number mutations, is a mechanism of gene expression regulation in fluctuating environments.
Natural selection and chance both determine pleiotropic effects of mutations in different environments. To investigate the pleiotropic consequences of adaptation, the authors evolved 20 replicate populations of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae in 11 laboratory environments and measured their fitness in multiple conditions.
A theoretical framework is developed, demonstrating that local modularity can coexist with large-scale nestedness in host–pathogen networks, and is validated on empirical data from plant–virus interactions in the field.
A biodiversity–ecosystem functioning experiment in a young subtropical forest shows that, at high species richness, directed but not random species loss leads to pronounced productivity decrease.
This study shows repulsion between virus and host codon usage bias when they are too similar, due to increased viral expression leading to levels of tRNA consumption that impede host translation.
A mesocosm experiment shows that prior exposure to a herbicide stressor facilitates subsequent community rescue, whereas high community biomass does not.
Three iron minerals found in alkaline hydrothermal vents are shown to convert CO2 and H2 into formate, acetate and pyruvate in water, suggesting that such reactions could have paved the way for early metabolism.
Developing a model of competitive outcomes in bacterial communities, the authors show that higher temperatures favour slower-growing species. They then confirm these predictions empirically in a series of two- and three-species coculture experiments.
A physiological model that defines the window for which the cost of metazoan development is minimized is used to predict which species will be most at risk from global warming.
Genome analysis of fungi responsible for Dutch elm disease shows that introgression has contributed to genomic diversity and has impacted fitness-related traits in these pathogens.
Ancient proteins in human dental calculus from sites across Mongolia spanning 5,000 years suggest dairy consumption on the eastern Eurasian steppe by circa 3000 bc, and the later emergence of horse milking at circa 1200 bc, concurrent with the first evidence for horse riding.
The history of human populations in the islands of the central and western Mediterranean is poorly understood. Here, the authors generate ancient-DNA data from the Balearic Islands, Sicily and Sardinia, and estimate the level and timing of steppe pastoralist, Iranian and North African ancestries in these populations.
Filamentous macrofossils from the one-billion-year-old Nanfen Formation of northern China are interpreted as a new species of early multicellular green algae.
A model of community assembly that is sequential and has saturating benefits of mutualism produces communities with internal stability for any level of diversity, and for which external stability depends on the balance of interaction types.
Ancient Salmonella enterica genomes from Neolithic Eurasian humans compared with those from later archaeological contexts illuminate the evolving host specificity of the pathogen from an initial multi-mammalian adaptation towards an increasingly human specialization.
A chromosomal-barcoding technique is used to study the evolutionary dynamics of approximately 450,000 distinct Escherichia coli lineages at sub-inhibitory antibiotic levels.
Applying the concept of ecosystem energetics to a grassland biodiversity experiment, the authors show that the storage and flow of energy across the whole trophic network, both above- and belowground, becomes more efficient as plant diversity increases.
Analysing data on group size and breeding systems of >4,700 species of birds, the authors show that complex sociality is more likely to arise in cooperative family groups than groups with unrelated individuals.
By analysing changes in occupancy among >5,000 species of invertebrates, bryophytes and lichens in the United Kingdom over the past 45 years, the authors find substantial turnover in community composition among all groups, although average declines are evident only among terrestrial non-insect invertebrates.
By competing native and invasive grass species in the California Floristic Province, the authors show that native species resist invasion by evolving to compete for resources used by the invader, rather than the two species co-evolving to differentiate their resource use.