Viruses and their hosts are locked in an evolutionary race where resistance to infection is acquired by the hosts while viruses develop strategies to circumvent these host defenses. Forming one arm of the host defense armory are cell autonomous restriction factors like Fv1. Originally described as protecting laboratory mice from infection by murine leukemia virus (MLV), Fv1s from some wild mice have also been found to restrict non-MLV retroviruses, suggesting an important role in the protection against...
Fri Oct 11, 2019 03:00
Pericentric heterochromatin in Drosophila is generally composed of repetitive DNA forming a transcriptionally repressive environment. Nevertheless, dozens of genes were embedded into pericentric genome regions during evolution of Drosophilidae lineage and retained functional activity. However, factors that contribute to "immunity" of these gene loci to transcriptional silencing remain unknown. Here, we investigated molecular evolution of the essential Myb and Ranbp16 genes. These protein-coding genes...
Fri Oct 11, 2019 03:00
Multidimensional analysis of traits are now a common toolkit in ecology and evolution and are based on trait-spaces in which each dimension summarise the observed trait combination (a morphospace or an ecospace). Observations of interest will typically occupy a subset of this trait-space, and researchers will apply one or more metrics to quantify the way in which organisms "inhabit" that trait-space. In macroevolution and ecology these metrics are referred to as disparity or dissimilarity metrics...
Fri Oct 11, 2019 03:00
A major goal in post-synthesis evolutionary biology has been to better understand how complex interactions between traits drive movement along and facilitate the formation of distinct evolutionary pathways. I present analyses of a character matrix sampled across the haplorrhine skeleton that revealed several modules of characters displaying distinct patterns in macroevolutionary disparity. Comparison of these patterns to those in neurological development showed that early ape evolution was characterized...
Fri Oct 11, 2019 03:00
To advance our understanding of adaptation to temporally varying selection pressures, we identified signatures of seasonal adaptation occurring in parallel among Drosophila melanogaster populations. To study these evolutionary dynamics, we estimated allele frequencies genome-wide from flies sampled early and late in the growing season from 20 widely dispersed populations. We identify parallel seasonal allele frequency shifts across North America and Europe, demonstrating that seasonal adaptation...
Fri Oct 11, 2019 03:00
Testing whether local adaptation and intrinsic reproductive isolation share a genetic basis can reveal important connections between adaptation and speciation. Local adaptation arises as advantageous alleles spread through a population, but whether these same advantageous alleles fail on the genetic backgrounds of other populations remains largely unknown. We used a quantitative genetic breeding design to produce a late generation (F4) recombinant hybrid population by equally mating amongst four...
Fri Oct 11, 2019 03:00
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