Volume 4 Issue 4, April 2020

There is an immediate need for a change in research workflows so that pre-existing knowledge is better used in designing new research. A formal assessment of the accumulated knowledge prior to research approval would reduce the waste of already limited resources caused by asking low priority questions.

Synthesizing evidence is an essential part of scientific progress, but it is often done in a slow and uncoordinated manner, sometimes producing misleading conclusions. Here, we propose the idea of an ‘open synthesis community’ to resolve this pressing issue.

Anthropogenic sensory pollutants, such as noise, light and chemicals, are affecting biodiversity. This Perspective uses an understanding of animal sensory ecology to explore how these impacts can be mitigated.

An analysis of 102 genomes shows remarkable levels of gene loss in ecdysozoans and deuterostomes and large genome novelties in deuterostomes and protostomes.

Phylogenomic analysis including representatives of all metazoan phyla shows gene duplication followed by differential gene loss throughout the animal tree of life.

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.

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 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.

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 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 mesocosm experiment shows that prior exposure to a herbicide stressor facilitates subsequent community rescue, whereas high community biomass does not.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This study uses isolated eye–brain preparations to show topographic visual and somatosensory representation in the lamprey pallium, which is similar to the basic sensorimotor representation of the mammalian neocortex.

Analysing phenotypic and genomic differences between urban and rural lizards, the authors identify a single non-synonymous polymorphism associated with heat tolerance plasticity that may explain how urban lizards can endure higher temperatures compared to those in forests.