Evolution articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Modern human genomes contain Neanderthal sequences, but it is unclear whether these were selected. Here, Khrameeva et al.show that Neanderthal sequences associated with lipid catabolism are three times more frequent in Europe, suggesting that these sequences might have been beneficial to Europeans.

    • Ekaterina E. Khrameeva
    • , Katarzyna Bozek
    •  & Philipp Khaitovich

  • Article |

    A transition from microbial-dominated Ediacara biota into modern ecosystems marks the beginning of the Cambrian. Here, Buatois et al.describe Ediacaran microbial mats in an early Cambrian formation in Canada suggesting that Ediacara biota persisted in the early Cambrian and abruptly disappeared later on.

    • Luis A. Buatois
    • , Guy M. Narbonne
    •  & Paul Myrow

  • Article |

    Hyposmocomais a diverse lineage of moths that occur across the entire Hawaiian Archipelago. Here, Haineset al. show that Hyposmocomais about 15 million years old, much older than the most recent islands, and that these moths have dispersed from remote Northwestern islands in many independent events.

    • William P. Haines
    • , Patrick Schmitz
    •  & Daniel Rubinoff

  • Article |

    Social behaviours such as altruism and spite are widespread in nature but the conditions that promote their evolution remain elusive. Here, Débarreet al. derive a model that captures general conditions for the evolution of social behaviour, which reveals the critical role of the scale of competition.

    • F. Débarre
    • , C. Hauert
    •  & M. Doebeli

  • Article |

    Bird song is commonly seen as a male trait that plays a role in female attraction, but its origin and prevalence in females are unknown. Here, Odom et al.show that female song is widespread and that it was present in the common ancestor of modern songbirds.

    • Karan J. Odom
    • , Michelle L. Hall
    •  & Naomi E. Langmore

  • Article |

    Competition can promote genetic divergence and speciation, but empirical evidence for this is scarce. Here, Winkelmann et al.show that competition between cichlid fish in Lake Tanganyika promotes the use of rocks or shells for shelter, contributing to morphological and genetic divergence.

    • Kai Winkelmann
    • , Martin J. Genner
    •  & Lukas Rüber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ornamental twin-tail goldfish has a bifurcated caudal skeleton that arose during domestication, but the developmental mechanisms that generate this tail are unknown. Here, Abe et al. show that a mutation in the chordingene affects embryonic dorsal–ventral patterning causing the bifurcated tail skeleton.

    • Gembu Abe
    • , Shu-Hua Lee
    •  & Kinya G. Ota

  • Article |

    It is unclear how interactions between individual genomes affect behaviour and survival in social organisms. Here, Teseo et al. show that genomic interactions between larvae and nursing adults of the clonal ant Cerapachys biroidetermine the proportion of individuals involved in reproduction or cooperation.

    • Serafino Teseo
    • , Nicolas Châline
    •  & Daniel J.C. Kronauer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hybrids often show poorer performance than their parents due to conflict between parental genes, but the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Here, Chen et al. identify three genes that activate immune responses and hinder hybrids growth in rice, a finding that may help rice breeding.

    • Chen Chen
    • , Hao Chen
    •  & Hong-Xuan Lin

  • Article |

    Plasmodium vivax, the leading cause of human malaria in Asia and Latin America, is thought to have an Asian origin. Here, the authors show that wild chimpanzees and gorillas in Africa are infected with parasites that are closely related to P. vivax, indicating an African origin for this species.

    • Weimin Liu
    • , Yingying Li
    •  & Paul M. Sharp

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Spirodela, or duckweed, is a basal monocotyledonous plant with both pharmaceutical and commercial value. Here, the authors sequence the genome of Spirodela polyrhiza, suggesting its genome has evolved by neotenous reduction and clonal propagation, and provide a platform for future comparative genomic studies in angiosperms.

    • W. Wang
    • , G. Haberer
    •  & J Messing

  • Article |

    Rusinga Island in Kenya is home to important fossil beds, including remains of the early ape Proconsul. Here the authors reconstruct the Early Miocene environment in Rusinga Island, and find that Proconsul lived in a dense closed-canopy tropical seasonal forest, a warm and relatively wet local habitat.

    • Lauren A. Michel
    • , Daniel J. Peppe
    •  & Kieran P. McNulty

  • Article |

    Burgess Shale-type deposits are critical to our understanding of the Cambrian diversity explosion. Here, Caron et al.report a new assemblage from the middle Cambrian Burgess Shale, British Columbia, with high diversity and abundance of soft-bodied taxa, providing new insights into the early diversification of metazoans.

    • Jean-Bernard Caron
    • , Robert R. Gaines
    •  & Michael Streng

  • Article |

    The genes EGLN1 and EPAS1 are candidates for high-altitude adaptations in Tibetan populations. Here, Jeong et al. demonstrate that the two genes show evidence of high-altitude ancestry in the Tibetan genome, suggesting the importance of population admixture for adaptation.

    • Choongwon Jeong
    • , Gorka Alkorta-Aranburu
    •  & Anna Di Rienzo

  • Article |

    Early Permian sphenacodontid synapsids were the first terrestrial large-bodied apex predators. Here, Brink and Reisz show that sphenacodontids had a diverse dentition associated with the evolution of changes in feeding style at the onset of the first well established, complex terrestrial ecosystems.

    • Kirstin S. Brink
    •  & Robert R. Reisz

  • Article |

    Theory predicts trade-offs between investments in precopulatory and postcopulatory sexual traits, but empirical evidence is inconsistent. Here, Lüpold et al.show that the covariance between pre- and postcopulatory sexual traits shifts from positive to negative with increasing male–male competition.

    • Stefan Lüpold
    • , Joseph L. Tomkins
    •  & John L. Fitzpatrick

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Locusts are destructive agricultural pests and serve as a model organism for studies of insects. Here, the authors report a draft genome sequence of the migratory locust, Locusta migratoria, and provide insight into genes associated with key survival traits such as phase-change, long-distance migration and feeding.

    • Xianhui Wang
    • , Xiaodong Fang
    •  & Le Kang

  • Article |

    It is generally assumed that ecologically relevant intraspecific diversity is restricted to DNA sequence variation. Here, Latzel et al.show that epigenetic diversity can increase the productivity of plant populations as well as their ability to suppress competitors.

    • Vít Latzel
    • , Eric Allan
    •  & Oliver Bossdorf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mechanical cues can induce morphogenetic processes during development. Here the authors show that mechanical changes during embryonic development in both zebrafish and Drosophilalead to nuclear localization of β-catenin, which regulates genes required for early mesoderm development in both species.

    • Thibaut Brunet
    • , Adrien Bouclet
    •  & Emmanuel Farge

  • Article |

    Allosauroids were common Jurassic–Cretaceous megapredators that disappeared in the Late Cretaceous faunal turnover. Here, Zanno and Makovicky describe Siats meekerorum, a giant new North American allosauroid from the Late Cretaceous, demonstrating that this clade co-occurred with and competitively excluded smaller tyrannosaurs.

    • Lindsay E. Zanno
    •  & Peter J. Makovicky

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Chemical communication can evolve from compounds used for other purposes, but experimental evidence is scarce. Here, Weiss et al.show a gradual evolution of a defensive compound into a competition avoidance mediator and a sex pheromone, which was accompanied by diversification of chemical messengers to obtain the required specificity.

    • Ingmar Weiss
    • , Thomas Rössler
    •  & Johannes Stökl

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The effect of the rate of forming and breaking social ties on cooperative behaviour is not clear. Here the authors experimentally test the effect of rewiring the connections between individuals, and find that optimal levels of cooperation are achieved at intermediate levels of change in ties.

    • Hirokazu Shirado
    • , Feng Fu
    •  & Nicholas A. Christakis

  • Article |

    Body clocks modulate physiological processes to follow a day–night cycle, but whether animals exposed to constant darkness express circadian rhythms is unknown. Here the authors examine the expression of circadian genes in Mexican cavefish, and find that these resemble a pattern expected from exposure to constant daylight.

    • Andrew Beale
    • , Christophe Guibal
    •  & David Whitmore

  • Article |

    Animal colouration is the product of competing selection pressures. Here the authors analyse the diversity of facial colouration in Old World monkeys and apes, and find that colour patterns are linked to social factors, whereas the different levels of facial pigmentation arise as a result of ecological pressures.

    • Sharlene E. Santana
    • , Jessica Lynch Alfaro
    •  & Michael E. Alfaro

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The early steps in the evolution of multicellularity are poorly understood. Here, Ratcliff et al. show that multicellularity can rapidly evolve in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, demonstrating that single-cell developmental bottlenecks may evolve rapidly via co-option of the ancestral phenotype.

    • William C. Ratcliff
    • , Matthew D. Herron
    •  & Michael Travisano

  • Article |

    The evolutionary origins of the chordate neural tube and notochord are unclear. Here the authors show the expression patterns of chordate patterning genes in a hemichordate, which suggest that the hemichordate endoderm and collar cord might be homologous to the chordate notochord and neural tube, respectively.

    • Norio Miyamoto
    •  & Hiroshi Wada

  • Article |

    Cladodontomorph sharks are Palaeozoic stem chondrichthyans thought to have disappeared at the end-Permian mass extinction. Here, Guinot et al.report the finding of a shark tooth assemblage from the Early Cretaceous recovered from southern France, which shows that this group survived the mass extinction in deep-sea refuges.

    • Guillaume Guinot
    • , Sylvain Adnet
    •  & Henri Cappetta

  • Article |

    Cells can adapt rapidly to survive and efficiently exploit constantly changing environments by varying their mutation rate. Here the authors construct an in silicosystem to modulate mutation rate, and demonstrate that this method can be used in the laboratory to create specific phenotypes.

    • Howard H. Chou
    •  & Jay D. Keasling

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Scorpions have maintained the primary anatomical features of their Paleozoic arthropod ancestors. Here, the authors report the genome sequence of Mesobuthus martensiiand highlight evidence of genetic and morphological evolution that represents a unique adaptation model of arthropods.

    • Zhijian Cao
    • , Yao Yu
    •  & Wenxin Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA variation has four major founders whose sources are difficult to trace due to the rarity of Ashkenazi Jews in the general population. Here, the authors provide evidence that all four major founders originated from Europe and provide a genealogical record of the Ashkenazi.

    • Marta D. Costa
    • , Joana B. Pereira
    •  & Martin B. Richards

  • Article |

    Spatial scale is important for ecological and evolutionary processes, yet objectively identifying critical scales has been challenging. Here, the authors illustrate how network modularity can identify critical scales in animal movement and significantly alter our understanding of ecological processes.

    • Robert J. Fletcher Jr
    • , Andre Revell
    •  & James D. Austin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Differences in resource availability or inequality of wealth are common both in nature and in human societies. Here the authors find that such inequality facilitates cooperation when the generation of public goods is inefficient, but hinders cooperation when the efficiency of joint actions is high.

    • Ádám Kun
    •  & Ulf Dieckmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Between 8000 and 4000 BP, agriculture spread throughout Europe changing consumption patterns and increasing populations. Shennan et al. analyse radiocarbon date distributions and paleoclimate proxies to show that agriculture also triggered regional population oscillations and that climate forcing is an unlikely cause.

    • Stephen Shennan
    • , Sean S. Downey
    •  & Mark G. Thomas

  • Article |

    Tooth shapes vary greatly amongst mammals, but the genetic underpinnings and functional relevance of new dental morphologies are largely unknown. Gomes Rodrigues et al. show that Eda and Edargenes modulate molar crest development in mice, enabling incipient adaptation to highly fibrous diets.

    • Helder Gomes Rodrigues
    • , Sabrina Renaud
    •  & Laurent Viriot

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