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We need to estimate protein tertiary structure, as well as using primary sequences, in order to further our understanding of protein evolution and evolutionary processes in general.
Female genital cutting in five West African nations is frequency-dependent and is associated with higher reproductive success among ethnicities in which cutting predominates, a fitness advantage that may outweigh its costs to physical and psychological health.
New palaeoecological data from New Guinea reveal that climatic change at the Holocene boundary is unlikely to have driven early agriculture in the region. More nuanced understanding of how humans responded to past climate change could better inform our responses in the future.
Artificial selection for antibiotic resistance in microorganisms reveals why and how expected evolutionary trade-offs between population growth rate and population carrying capacity are not observed in resource-limited environments, with ‘trade-ups’ occurring instead.
New microfossils suggest that a rich meiofauna was already present in the early Cambrian, offering a solution to the problem that the Cambrian explosion appears to have sprung out of nothing.
Data from many genes across the genome are now being routinely used in the hope of reconstructing challenging parts of the tree of life, and a new method provides a practical way of resolving the phylogenetic trees suggested by different genes.
Bat species that echolocate using signals from their larynx, and those that do not, all share a similar pattern of inner ear development that is distinct from other mammals, implying a single evolutionary origin of laryngeal echolocation.
Plant–insect interactions reveal rapid recovery of terrestrial ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, at more than twice the rate of contemporaneous Northern Hemisphere ecosystems.
Analysis of environmental DNA (eDNA) extracted from just 30 litres of seawater from the Arabian Gulf provides genetic insights into populations of the largest fish in the world.
Microcosm experiments show that post-invasion evolution of residents and invaders means invasive species effects are even harder to predict than previously thought.
Analysis of bacterial communities inhabiting water ‘tanks’ in the foliage of tropical bromeliads reveals a surprising similarity in their metabolic capacity, despite large variation in microbial taxa.
