Volume 6 Issue 10, October 2022

To facilitate evolutionary adaptation to climate change, we must protect networks of coral reefs that span a range of environmental conditions — not just apparent ‘refugia’.

Cnidarians and ctenophores have morphologically simpler nervous systems than those of bilaterians. Discovery and characterization of neuropeptides in a comb jelly and a sea anemone support a common origin of animal peptidergic neurons from digestive cells that could sense their environment.

Coevolutionary warfare between bacteria and phage results in the diversification of anti-phage CRISPR arrays among the most successful bacterial competitors

Many viruses evolve quickly, leading to the coexistence of multiple strains within the same host and population. In this Review, the authors synthesize ecological and evolutionary approaches to studying the dynamics of multi-strain RNA virus infections and suggest opportunities for future work.

Examining drivers of the latitudinal biodiversity gradient in a global database of local tree species richness, the authors show that co-limitation by multiple environmental and anthropogenic factors causes steeper increases in richness with latitude in tropical versus temperate and boreal zones.

Biochemical identification of neuropeptides in Cnidaria and Ctenophora, followed by analyses of their expression, suggests that peptidergic neurons were present at early stages of nervous system evolution.

Analysis of genetic variation underlying an antipredator morphological defence in Daphnia pulex shows that stabilizing selection operates on this plastic trait.

Eukaryotic phylogenies inferred from metabarcoding show that marine and non-marine microbial eukaryotes are in general phylogenetically distinct, but that transitions across the salt barrier have occurred hundreds of times, and in all lineages, and are particularly important for evolutionary diversification in fungi.

Tracking the behaviour of normal versus microbiome-free honeybees in experimental colonies, the authors show that gut microbiota colonization was associated with an increase in the rate and specificity of social interactions among bees and higher abundances of brain metabolites linked to these interactions.

This experimental study shows how the interplay between bacteria-phage coevolution and competition among bacterial genotypes results in increased diversity of bacterial CRISPR immunity.

Analyses of phenotypic variety in Fungi show that fungal body plans diversified episodically over time and appear distinct because of the extinction of intermediate forms, similar to what has been described in animals.

Studying all amino acid substitutions in the yeast cytosine deaminase Fcy1, the target of the antifungal 5-FC, the authors show a sharp trade-off between 5-FC resistance and growth sustained by cytosine deamination.

The timescale over which ecosystem functions rely on biodiversity is not well characterized. Analysing pollination of two different crops by wild bees, the authors show that a greater number of species are needed to provide the same threshold pollination service as temporal scale increases.

The authors develop a theoretical method to reduce the complex dynamics of a mutualistic system to a single dynamical equation, which is then used to estimate and compare the distances to a potential tipping point across systems with scaled recovery rates.

Differences in a non-coding enhancer region of the HOXDB locus underlie the differences between stickleback species in dorsal spine length and number. These differences include single-nucleotide polymorphisms, deletions and transposable element insertions.

The authors analyse hundreds of animal and human footprints spanning at least 8,000 years at Formby on the Irish Sea coast of Britain. In the absence of conventional faunal records, the footprints document long-term changes in large mammal diversity and human activity during the Holocene.

Iron–sulfur (Fe–S) clusters are cofactors essential for life. Combining large-scale phylogenomic analyses with biochemical validation, the authors identify two ancestral minimal Fe–S cluster biogenesis systems and show that they originated before Earth oxygenation.

Genetic evidence suggests that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens repeatedly interbred in Europe. Here the authors generate predictions for how this might manifest in the late Pleistocene fossil record of Europe, focusing on the skull, and analyse the available evidence.