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Using an algorithm for ancestral genome reconstruction, the authors present 624 ancestral genomes for vertebrates, plants, fungi, metazoans and protists and reconstruct the chromosomal rearrangement history of all major vertebrate clades.
Trace element ratios (strontium/calcium) in teeth of Pleistocene Homo erectus and fossil orangutans (Pongo sp.) reveal different dietary strategies and contrasting adaptations to seasonal food resources. H. erectus but not Pongo sp. was able to buffer against seasonal food oscillations by exploiting more varied food sources.
The authors generate a genome-wide dataset of 102 individuals who lived in Crete, the Greek mainland and the Aegean islands between the Neolithic and the Iron Age, identifying high levels of biological and cultural connectedness within the ancient Aegean.
Multidecadal ground and remote-sensing observations of Northern Hemisphere forests show that, at the decadal scale, autumn senescence dates and total net carbon assimilation are positively related, despite a negative relationship at the annual scale. This suggests that acclimation relieves the leaf longevity constraints.
Single-cell RNA sequencing of testes from young and old male Drosophila, together with genomic sequencing of somatic tissues of the same flies, shows distinct mutational biases in old and young flies and suggests late spermatogenesis as a source of evolutionary innovation.
Analysing subtropical forest soils from a 2,000 km transect across China, the authors show that temperature fluctuations can induce the thermal adaptation of microbial respiration, in contrast to findings derived from mean temperature alone.
Linking plant traits to long-term pollen records over the Holocene, the authors track changes in functional diversity over the last 12,000 years in southeast Australia and use this to predict vegetation changes under future climate change.
Three complementary decomposition experiments across a climatic gradient in Europe, representing 110 different tree species mixtures in 194 forest plots, reveals that macroclimate is a dominant control on plant litter decomposition through both direct and indirect effects.
Analysing a global dataset of >24,000 observations of coral reef benthic cover, the authors show that high macroalgal cover is largely restricted to the Western Atlantic, where alongside the Central Pacific there have also been marked declines in coral cover since the late 1990s.
In a widespread sampling campaign across urban soils, the authors find that soil biodiversity, but not plant diversity, is positively related to multiple ecosystem functions in urban environments.
Combining modelling of living human participants and chimpanzees with analysis of fossil hominin trackways, the authors distinguish between the earliest evidence of modern human-like bipedal kinematics and earlier hominin precursors.
In a replicated ecosystem-scale natural experiment across ten islands in the Indian Ocean, invasive black rats disrupted nutrients provided by seabirds, leading to a coral reef fish having larger territories and investing less time in aggression than on rat-free islands.
The authors develop a new metric to measure the error-corrected convergence rate of protein evolution, together with a heuristic algorithm to detect signals of adaptive protein convergence.
Using synthetic human gut communities and computational modelling, the authors show that increasing the complexity of dietary carbohydrates reduces microbial growth, balances positive and negative interspecies interactions, and reduces community sensitivity to perturbations.
Comparing the brain anatomy of fossil hominins and extant primates, the authors determine that strong covariation between different areas of the brain in Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis evolved under higher evolutionary rates than in any other primate. Strong covariation is present in juvenile and adult H. sapiens, and in juvenile but not adult great apes.
Studying human-specific de novo genes originated from long non-coding RNA, the authors reveal molecular mechanisms that facilitate nuclear export of these young genes, and show experimental evidence for the role of one such gene in brain development.
The authors resample a plant–pollinator network that was initially characterized by a naturalist in the late nineteenth century in Finland. They find that only 7% of the original interactions persisted; generally, specialist pollinators disproportionally declined while generalist muscoid flies increased as the abundant pollinators.
Barcode lineage tracking of a competitive mutualism between Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Chlamydomonas reinhardtii shows that selection favours yeast mutants that increase the yields of both species and strengthen the mutualism.
Cratonavis zhui, a bird from the Early Cretaceous of China, preserves a combination of non-avialan theropod skull features and a bird-like post-cranial skeleton.
An Indonesia-wide analysis identifies locations for potential mangrove restoration, ranked by scenarios of success likelihood according to biogeomorphology, current and past land use and land tenure, and estimates the restoration costs.