The interplay of mutation and natural selection is key to evolution: Mutations introduce genetic variation, whereas selection favours higher-fitness individuals. The balance between the two is...

Many animal species replace histones with protamines during spermatogenesis. Despite their importance for sperm function, protamines rapidly evolve in many species; the biological causes behind their...

Biological invasions impose new selective pressures on native species, prompting rapid evolutionary responses. We examined how the parasitic larvae (glochidia) of the invasive East Asian mussel...

Euphorbia subgenus Esula is one of four main lineages within the megadiverse angiosperm genus Euphorbia. It comprises 490 species, including herbs, shrubs, dendroid shrubs, and succulents. The...

Individuals can cooperate in groups to achieve greater fitness, but the contribution of each individual to the collective good may depend on group size and on strategies employed by other members....

Whole genome duplication (WGD) has had profound macroevolutionary impacts on diverse lineages, preceding adaptive radiations in vertebrates, teleost fish, and angiosperms. In contrast to the many...

Understanding how complex, multi-gene systems evolve and function across genetic backgrounds is a central question in molecular evolution. While such systems often impose costs through epistatic...

Females influence offspring paternity through diverse pre- and post-copulatory mechanisms. Sperm discrimination- the differential physiological response to ejaculates based on male or sperm charact...

Dental topography is a powerful tool for investigating the relationship between diet and tooth shape in mammals. Here, we test whether dental topographic metrics (DTMs) can accurately predict diet in...

Identifying the genetic basis of reproductive barriers is essential for understanding the origin and maintenance of biological diversity. While some hybrid incompatibilities evolve as incidental...

Theoretical studies have proposed that coevolution with parasitic replicators plays a critical role in the evolution of primitive life; however, experimental verification of the potential outcomes of...

Phylogenomics has the power to uncover complex evolutionary hypothesis across taxa, thereby allowing important glimpses into the evolutionary history, such as incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) and...

Stochasticity plays an important role in all biological systems. The standard way to deal with stochasticity involves averaging over an ensemble of independent realizations. However, such mean...

Host-parasite interactions are predicted to exhibit geographic heterogeneity, creating the opportunity for local adaptation. This is difficult to detect because it requires knowledge of selection...

Evolution has given rise to lifespans in extant species ranging from days to centuries. Given that mechanisms of ageing are highly conserved, studying long-lived lineages across the animal kingdom...

The evolution of mating signals drives reproductive isolation and speciation across diverse lineages. However, how short peptide pheromones, typically subject to strong structural constraints,...

The molecular machinery for replicating and repairing DNA accurately is critically important for life and highly conserved across the Tree of Life. Here we show that two major lineages of fungi,...

The reconstruction of human evolutionary history has undergone repeated advances, each made possible by methodological innovations. In recent decades, genetic and genomic data played a central role...

Inference of interspecific gene flow using genomic data is important to reliable reconstruction of species phylogenies and to our understanding of the speciation process. Gene flow is harder to...

Mutualism is often selected in vertically transmitted symbionts due to their fitness interdependence with hosts. However, the evolution of mutualism remains unclear in symbionts using both vertical...