Volume 6 Issue 4, April 2022

Quantitative geneticist who made fundamental contributions to understanding the nature of genetic variation.

Age estimation based on DNA methylation levels suggests that hibernation arrests biological ageing in wild yellow-bellied marmots.

The rate of fixation of different antibiotic-resistance mutation types demonstrates a trade-off shaped by population size.

Population genomic and phylogenomic analyses of Atlantic cod provide new insights into the origin and maintenance of supergenes and highlight the role of recombination and structural variants.

Evidence of ostrich eggshell artefacts, long-distance transport of marine shells and heat treatment of stone tools in a marginal southern African environment 92–80 thousand years ago suggests that innovation among early human groups was sensitive to ecological variation.

Associations with mycorrhizal fungi can affect many aspects of plant ecology, including the structuring of plant communities at large spatial scales. Here, the authors use forest inventory plot data to show that tree species diversity is highest in plots with mixed presence of arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal fungi, while plots with dominance by either fungal type have lower diversity.

Forests tend to be comprised of tree species that mostly associate with either arbuscular or ectomycorrhizal fungi. The authors show that positive feedbacks maintain this biomodal distribution of dominant mycorrhizal associations across US forest inventory plots.

The authors conduct competition experiments with multiple strains of Pseudomonas (some pathogenic and some commensal) in the phylosphere microbiome of Arabidopsis plants, showing that both the host and the commensal strains interact to inhibit the pathogenic strains.

The authors use tree-ring width data across the extratropical Northern Hemisphere to show that earlier growing season onsets lead to enhanced tree radial growth in cold humid but not in dry areas.

Tadpoles with experimentally manipulated microbiomes have reduced activity of mitochondrial enzymes and altered metabolic rates, resulting in altered thermal sensitivity of locomotion and reduced thermal tolerance and survival.

Species that hibernate generally have longer lifespans than expected based on their body size. The authors show epigenetic ageing patterns from a natural population of hibernating yellow-bellied marmots consistent with the hypothesis that ageing is suspended during hibernation.

Constructing a fitness landscape from the fitness of Escherichia coli carrying single point mutants in VIM-2 β-lactamase across environments with different ampicillin concentrations and the antibiotic resistance of each variant, the authors show that the evolution of β-lactamases can be predicted based on the selection pressure in the environment.

Population size influences mutation supply but may also influence what types of mutations eventually become fixed. Here, Schenk et al. show that small and large experimentally evolving bacteria populations predictably fix different types of mutations, with greater antibiotic resistance emerging in large populations.

This study assesses the capacity for sexual and asexual reproduction and the chronological life span across 1,011 genome-sequenced budding yeast isolates and shows the remarkable impact of domestication on budding yeast evolution.

Genomic analysis of an Alpine whitefish radiation before and after human-driven lake eutrophication that led to the extinction of one species through hybridization shows that substantial parts of the genome of the extinct species persist within surviving species due to introgressive hybridization.

Atlantic cod carries four supergenes linked to migratory lifestyle and environmental adaptations. Using whole-genome sequencing, the authors show that the genome inversions that underlie the supergenes originated at different times and show gene flux between supergene haplotypes.