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By studying brain DNA methylation across 13 distantly related animals, the authors show that non-CpG DNA methylation, which plays a regulatory role in cognition, is restricted to vertebrates and was assembled at the origin of the vertebrate lineage as a result of the ancestral vertebrate whole-genome duplication.
The intensity of UVA light, in addition to the photoperiod, is shown to determine seasonal change in the marine mass spawning annelid Platynereis dumerilii.
This study uses evolve-and-resequence experiments with fission yeast populations subjected to disruptive ecological selection under different levels of migration to ask how gene flow, ancestral variation and genetic correlations affect the evolution of adaptive divergence.
A meta-analysis of experimental effects of stressors on marine organisms shows that hypoxia could harm crustaceans, mollusks and fish to a larger extent than warming and acidification.
Propagating bacteriophage in cocultures of multiple host strains, the authors show that increasing host strain diversity decreases the rate of adaptation and selects for lower fitness generalists over higher fitness specialists.
An age-structured population model shows that purifying selection is the norm in humans for alleles that increase susceptibility to many late-onset diseases, and that sociocultural factors need to be taken into account to understand apparent neutrality.
Analysing data from thousands of microbial communities, the authors show that these communities cluster at different ends of the spectrum between resource competition and metabolic cooperation. Cooperative communities tend to have smaller genomes and multiple auxotrophies, whereas competitive communities have larger genomes, overlapping niches and a high potential for antimicrobial activity.
The future challenges and potential opportunities of robotics and autonomous systems in urban ecosystems, and how they may impact biodiversity, are explored and prioritized via a global horizon scan of 170 experts.
Based on a global-scale analysis of the leaf elemental composition of tree species, the authors show that shared ancestry is the major factor shaping plant elementomes, thus providing large-scale empirical support for the biogeochemical niche hypothesis.