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Long-term maintenance of genetic polymorphism by balancing selection is rare. Here, the authors show that a polymorphism that impacts the physiology of nitrogen fixation has been maintained for tens of millions of years of diversification in a thermophilic cyanobacterium.
A microcosm experiment replicated across 14 laboratories shows that deliberate inclusion of genetic variation enhances the reproducibility of an ecological study.
Genetic sex determination (GSD) is more common in animals than environmental sex determination. Here, the authors show that the prevalence of GSD is due to the coupling of genes that bias offspring sex ratios towards one sex with genes that are beneficial in that sex but costly in the other.
Ancient DNA from victims of a sixteenth-century disease in Mexico suggests that Salmonella enterica Paratyphi C (enteric fever) was responsible for a devastating epidemic that closely followed European presence in the region.
In individual bacteria, restriction–modification systems inhibit both lytic and lysogenic infection by bacteriophage. But at a population level, restriction–modification systems increase the probability of lysogeny by delaying infection onset.
A theoretical model with supporting empirical evidence shows that plants, animals and microbes have approximately equal fitness due to a trade-off between generation time and production, constrained within biophysical boundaries.
Secondary school students in the United Kingdom with lower initial levels of acceptance of evolution show lower increases in understanding of evolution in response to teaching of the topic than those students with initially higher acceptance scores. These lower-acceptance students are more likely to be in teacher-stratified lower-ability classes and also have lower responses to teaching of genetics.
Savannah faunas developed in a spatially and temporally connected palaeobiome that flourished in the mid Miocene, before fragmenting into Eurasian and African branches in the late Miocene.