Reviews & Analysis

A modelling study suggests that the ecology of host co-colonisation may play a key role in shaping population-level frequencies of antibiotic resistance in commensal bacteria.

Climate change is spatially asymmetrical and so will alter the behaviour of generalist consumer species, affecting food webs in two ways. Movement into novel ecosystems will affect the topology of food webs, while changes within an ecosystem will affect interaction strengths.

This Review discusses recent advances in our understanding of the evolutionary importance of ancient hybridization, adaptive introgression, and hybrid speciation brought about by whole genome data of non-model organisms.

Clonal or isogenic model organisms allow for controlled replication, but their isolation from natural systems compromises their relevance for ecology and evolution research. However, a substantial number of vertebrate species reproduce clonally in nature and are an underused resource.

The importance of biodiversity for productive community functioning is emerging as one of a very few general rules in ecology, but evidence has been sparse that it applies in tropical coral reefs—until now.

Radiocarbon dates from Spain put anatomically modern humans in southernmost Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, diminishing the case for late survival of Neanderthals in the region.

Two soil respiration studies conducted at different spatial and temporal extents each find evidence that thermal adaptation of microbial communities compensates for loss of soil carbon under idealized conditions.

Influenza viruses undergo rapid antigenic evolution. Analysis of a large dataset of influenza virus sequences, using host age as a proxy for immune experience, shows no evidence for immune positive selection driving antigenic evolution in individual infected humans.