Evolutionary Biology

eLife Assessment

This important study presents an innovative combination of experimental evolution and CRISPR screening to study the genetic basis of a polygenic trait, resistance against octanoic acid in Drosophila. The evidence supporting the authors claims is solid. The work will be of interest to the Drosophila community and researchers interested in functional testing of polygenic traits.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study presents a comparative dataset on crab locomotion to investigate the evolution of sideways walking. The evidence supporting the authors' claims is convincing. This work will be of broad interest to researchers in animal locomotion and evolutionary biology.

eLife Assessment

This important study provides convincing evidence that envelope-carrying Ty3/gypsy retrotransposons (errantiviruses) are ancient and widespread across nearly all major animal phyla, with distribution in many lineages that are consistent with recent or ongoing genomic expansion. Using comprehensive phylogenetic and AlphaFold2-based structural analyses, together with new host-taxonomy concordance tests, the authors show that these elements independently acquired membrane fusion proteins early in metazoan evolution, likely predating the bilaterian-non-bilaterian split. The work offers significant insights into the deep evolutionary roots of retroelement-envelope associations and the origins of retroviruses.

eLife Assessment

The focus of this manuscript is a computational procedure to reveal signatures of selection on transcription factor binding sites through assessing changes in predicted binding affinity, setting out to avoid biases inherent in previous tests. The general approach could become a valuable resource for the community that can also be used for a broader range of questions. However, in its current implementation, the methods are inadequate to sufficiently support the primary claims.

eLife Assessment

This paper presents important findings on how the shapes of leaves might be biased towards simpler shapes due to biases in how variation is generated by developmental processes rather than selection. The authors present solid evidence that combines image analysis of a herbarium dataset and computational analysis of a model of leaf development. The paper should be of interest to diverse researchers, ranging from plant development to the evolution of complexity more broadly.

eLife Assessment

In this important theoretical contribution, the authors study the evolution of large microbial populations competing for resources in the challenging and relevant regime of overlapping ecological and evolutionary timescales. The modeling approach is overall convincing, anlthough its presentation would benefit from clarifications, e.g. on assumptions and approximations. The results will be of broad interest to researchers in evolutionary biology, ecology and microbiology.

eLife Assessment

Tropical single-island endemic bird populations are particularly vulnerable to climate change. This study investigates genetic evidence of how such species dealt with climate change in the past as a possible predictor of how they will respond in the future, which could provide an important example for the fields of conservation genetics and island biogeography. The authors' integration of genomics and habitat modeling is commendable, but we find that the support for their conclusions is currently inadequate: some model parameter choices do not seem to reflect the biology of the studied species or to be well founded, which can cause misalignment of modeled dynamics with glaciation windows crucial for interpreting the study's results against its claims.