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An automation-enabled evolution experiment in which genes from across the tree of life are introduced into Escherichia coli shows that mutations that upregulate the introduced gene can mitigate fitness defects without the need for coding changes.
Multiproxy archaeobotanical analyses of an abandoned agricultural terrace at Wagadagam document extensive, low-intensity forms of plant management from at least 2,145–1,930 cal yr bp and intensive forms of cultivation at 1,376–1,293 cal yr bp.
Analysing >5,000 population abundance time series for insects and other arthropods from 68 sites within the US Long Term Ecological Research network, the authors find high variation but no overall trend in abundance and diversity among sites and taxa.
Males of the malaria vector species Anopheles arabiensis and Anopheles gambiae produce and release aggregation pheromones that attract individuals to the swarm, enhancing mating success. The authors argue that manipulating such pheromones could increase the efficacy of malaria-vector control programmes.
Combining global eddy covariance observations and photosynthesis estimates from terrestrial biosphere models, the authors demonstrate widespread acclimation of photosynthesis to light in natural environments, with croplands showing stronger acclimation rates than forests or grasslands.
Diversification trajectories of skeletal non-colonial marine families show increased capacity of marine ecosystems to accommodate highly diverse communities over the Phanerozoic.
The evolutionary origin of insect wings is unclear. Gene expression and functional analyses show a gene network operating in the terga and proximal leg segments of the crustacean evo-devo model Parhyale hawaiensis, similar to the insect wing gene network.
Analysing archaic and modern human genomes, the authors show that Neanderthal introgression reintroduced thousands of lost ancestral variants with gene regulatory activity and that these reintroduced alleles are more tolerated by modern humans than introgressed Neanderthal-derived alleles.
Screening >100 bee and >80 flower species for five common microparasites over 26 weeks, the authors show that parasite prevalence increases in bees toward the end of the growing season, but decreases on plants, and is related to bee diversity, abundance and community composition.
Comparing Mexican cavefish from rivers with those from caves, the authors show increased sensitivity of the innate and adaptive immune system that is accompanied by a reduced investment in the innate immune system as an evolutionary response to lower parasite diversity.
Phylogenetic analysis shows that site-exclusion methods produce erratic phylogenetic estimates of mitochondrial origin and support an origin of mitochondria within Alphaproteobacteria.
Manipulation of Hh and other genes involved in neural development of the chordate amphioxus reveals conservation and differences in neural patterning mechanisms between vertebrates and amphioxus.
An analysis across multiple species groups and different facets of stand-level heterogeneity in temperate forests from Central Europe reveals that heterogeneity–diversity relationships are not generalizable and predictable as modelling approaches suggest, varying even between ecologically similar species groups.
Analysing data on egg size and planktonic duration from >750 marine species with a larval period, the authors show that temperature, life-history and oceanographic processes interact to shape peaks of dispersal at low and high latitudes.
Three-dimensional reconstructions of Homo erectus, Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal suggest a recent evolutionary origin for the comparatively shallow modern human thorax.
Discovery cohorts from three continents, plus experiments in mouse models, are used to identify microbial species and mechanisms involved in post-antibiotic gut community recovery.
Unstable and harsh climates have been implicated as partial causes of Neanderthal demise. Here a speleothem palaeoenvironmental record spanning the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition attests to stable and moderate conditions in the Mediterranean during this time suggesting a more complicated picture than previously thought.
A new study of the divergence time of angiosperm families shows that although most angiosperm families originated during the middle Cretaceous (~100–90 million years ago), the diversification of families into extant diversity was delayed until the Palaeocene (~66–56 million years ago), this time lag being geographically heterogeneous, and longer in tropical than in temperate and arid biomes.
Invasion of land required changes of vertebrate metabolism. Here, the authors report a pathway for sulfur metabolism present in chick embryos but not in mammals, which originated around 300 million years ago in a proto-reptile.