Eusociality and parastitism are specific life-history strategies particularly common in Hymenoptera. At the population genetics level, low effective population size and reduced efficiency of purifying selection have been suggested as an evolutionary consequence of both social life and parasitism. In this study, we tested these hypotheses by estimating the relative rate of non-synonymous substitution in 169 species to investigate the variation in natural selection efficiency and effective population...
Wed Aug 26, 2020 03:00
Levels of sex differences for human body size and shape phenotypes are hypothesized to have adaptively reduced following the adoption of agriculture. In this study, we tested this hypothesis by first identifying thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that differentially impact trait variation between British females and males for five phenotypes: height, body mass, hip circumference, body fat percentage, and waist circumference. After confirming the biological plausibility of these SNPs,...
Wed Aug 26, 2020 03:00
Evolutionary rescue is the process by which a population, in response to an environmental change, successfully avoids extinction through adaptation. In spatially structured environments, dispersal can affect the probability of rescue. Here, we model an environment consisting of patches that degrade one after another, and we investigate the probability of rescue by a mutant adapted to the degraded habitat. We focus on the effects of dispersal and of immigration biases. We find that the probability...
Wed Aug 26, 2020 03:00
Due to their effects on reducing recombination, chromosomal inversions may play an important role in speciation by establishing and/or maintaining linked blocks of genes causing reproductive isolation (RI) between populations. These views fit empirical data indicating that inversions typically harbour loci involved in RI. However, previous computer simulations of infinite populations with 2-4 loci involved in RI implied that, even with gene flux as low as 10^(-8) between alternative arrangements,...
Wed Aug 26, 2020 03:00
Background: How vascular systems and their respiratory pigments evolved is still debated. While many animals present a vascular system, hemoglobin exists as a blood pigment only in a few groups (Vertebrates, Annelids, a few Arthropod and Mollusk species). Hemoglobins are formed of globin sub-units, belonging to multigene families, in various multimeric assemblages. It was so far unclear whether hemoglobin families from different Bilaterian groups had a common origin. Results: To unravel globin evolution...
Wed Aug 26, 2020 03:00
Bacterial symbionts that manipulate the reproduction of their hosts are important factors in invertebrate ecology and evolution. Studying the genomic and phenotypic diversity of reproductive manipulators can improve efforts to control infectious diseases and contribute to our understanding of host-symbiont evolution. Despite the vast genomic and phenotypic diversity of reproductive manipulators, only a handful of strains are used as biological control agents because little is known about the broad...
Tue Aug 25, 2020 03:00
Pleiotropic fitness trade-offs and their opposite, buttressing pleiotropy, underlie many important phenomena in ecology and evolution. Yet, predicting whether a population adapting to one ("home") environment will concomitantly gain or lose fitness in another ("non-home") environment remains challenging, especially when adaptive mutations have diverse pleiotropic effects. Here, we address this problem using the concept of the joint distribution of fitness effects (JDFE), a local measurable property...
Tue Aug 25, 2020 03:00
Accurate genomic knowledge can elucidate the global spread patterns of invasive pests. The high-profile invasive agricultural pest Spodoptera frugiperda (fall armyworm; FAW) is a case in point. Native to the Americas, the FAW was first reported in West Africa in 2016 and has rapidly spread to over 64 countries across the Old World, resulting in significant economic losses. The chronological order of reported detections has led to the hypothesis that the FAW moved eastwards across Africa and then...
Tue Aug 25, 2020 03:00
New species arise as the genomes of populations diverge. The developmental 'alarm clock' of speciation sounds off when sufficient divergence in genetic control of development leads hybrid individuals to infertility or inviability, the world awoken to the dawn of new species with intrinsic post-zygotic reproductive isolation. Some developmental stages will be more prone to hybrid dysfunction due to how molecular evolution interacts with the ontogenetic timing of gene expression. Considering the ontogeny...
Tue Aug 25, 2020 03:00
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