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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.
A series of behavioural, electrophysiological and chemical assays are used to attempt to detect long-range sex pheromones involved in species-specific male swarm recognition by Anopheles female mosquitoes, but no evidence is found.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Analysis of genetic variation underlying an antipredator morphological defence in Daphnia pulex shows that stabilizing selection operates on this plastic trait.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The authors use a theoretical model along with competition experiments between two aquatic plant species to show that phenotypic plasticity affects the outcome of competition.
Analysis of the species richness and functional diversity among species across 72 lakes finds that both variables are positively associated with ecosystem multifunctionality, but that—for smaller organisms only—these positive relationships break down with increasing human pressure.
Analysing the energetic constraints on prokaryotic cell size, the energetic implications of eukaryotic genome architecture, and the presence of endosymbionts, the authors suggest that mitochondria were not required for the initial origin of eukaryotes, but did facilitate their subsequent diversification and expansion.
A NutNet experiment in 57 grasslands across six continents shows that when herbivores are excluded from grasslands with a long coevolutionary history of grazing plant diversity is reduced, while in grasslands without a long grazing history the evolutionary history of the plant species regulates the response of plant diversity.