Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Evolutionary biology is a subdiscipline of the biological sciences concerned with the origin of life and the diversification and adaptation of life forms over time.
An analysis of publicly available viral genomes explores the evolutionary dynamics of host jumps and shows that humans are as much a source of viral spillover events to other animals as they are recipients.
An interdisciplinary approach following replication errors in Escherichia coli unveils that many spontaneous mutations originate from inefficient repair, and that repair capacity is variable between single cells within a bacterial population.
Correspondence between genome and organismal complexity over macroevolutionary time is poorly understood. Here the authors show that multicellular eukaryotes increasingly simplify their genomes and suggest that the concept of functional outsourcing, via ecological interactions, could explain this paradoxical complexity decoupling.
This protocol is for using PanSyn, the first software package for the identification of micro- and macrosynteny and their functional integration for comprehensive characterization of genome architecture and regulatory evolution.
Synteny and colinearity are important parameters that delineate the evolution of genomes and gene families. This protocol describes MCScanX, a user-friendly toolkit that facilitates rapid evolutionary analysis of chromosomal structural changes.
An analysis of publicly available viral genomes explores the evolutionary dynamics of host jumps and shows that humans are as much a source of viral spillover events to other animals as they are recipients.
In this Journal Club, Yoav Ram recalls how he reconciled results from his own research with the reduction principle through the help of a paper published in PNAS by Altenberg et al.
Using over 200 chromosomal genomes to reconstruct 250 million years of evolutionary history, we define the 32 linkage groups (Merian elements) that were present in the ancestor of Lepidoptera. We chart the dynamics of chromosome fusion and fission that accompanied the global diversification of Lepidoptera.
Beer et al. use multiple complementary approaches to show that declining densities of the Tasmanian devil have had evolutionary effects on gene flow and selection in the subordinate predator, the spotted-tail quoll.
Data that span 15 generations reveal how gene flow and selection in a subordinate mesopredator are affected by pathogen-driven declines in the population density of a top predator. This work highlights the evolutionary impacts of interspecific competition and elucidates landscape-scale effects of an indirect interaction between a pathogen and nonhost species.