Evolutionary Biology

Most Beefalo cattle have no detectable bison genetic ancestry

1. Beth Shapiro
2. Jonas Oppenheimer
3. Michael P Heaton
4. Kristen L Kuhn
5. Richard E Green
6. Harvey D Blackburn
7. Timothy PL Smith

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study used whole-genome data to investigate Beefalo ancestry for the first time, providing insight into the genetics of Beefalo cattle and challenging the long-held claim of 37.5% bison ancestry reported by the American Beefalo Association. Despite some limitations regarding sequencing depth and sampling, the expert use of a comprehensive set of population-genomic methods allowed the authors to demonstrate convincingly that Beefalo and bison hybrid ancestry profiles are consistent with repeated backcrossing to either parental species. The work will be of significant interest to evolutionary biologists, population geneticists, animal breeders, and those involved in the conservation genetics of bovine species.

Reviewed by eLife

Somatic Programmed DNA Elimination is widespread in free-living Rhabditidae nematodes

1. Caroline Launay
2. Eva Wenger
3. Brice Letcher
4. Marie Delattre

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  In this manuscript, the authors investigate programmed DNA elimination (PDE) across nematodes using a large-scale cytological approach. This work is potentially significant because it expands PDE beyond a few known nematodes to a much broader set of Rhabditidae species, providing an important resource for investigating PDE's evolutionary origins and functions. The strength of evidence, however, is incomplete; the technique used to evaluate PDE is insufficient to provide unambiguous support for the phenomenon, so additional methods, such as genomic sequencing from a few species spanning the range of elimination levels, would be required to confirm these findings. This research would be of interest to geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and those working on the regulation of genome integrity.

Reviewed by eLife

Constraints on the G1/S transition pathway may favor selection of multicellularity as a passenger phenotype

1. Tom Louis Ducrocq
2. Damien Laporte
3. Bertrand Daignan-Fornier

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study implicates that changes in cell regulation may contribute to the evolution of multicellularity. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing, with rigorous methods used to test alternative hypotheses. The work will be of broad interest to cell and evolutionary biologists and those studying the cell cycle and cancer.

Reviewed by eLife

Quantifying microbial fitness in high-throughput experiments

1. Justus Wilhelm Fink
2. Michael Manhart

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This manuscript applies a theoretical analysis to two published datasets on yeast and bacterial evolution to compare different ways of quantifying fitness. It makes an important advance by clarifying how discrepancies can arise by using different approaches and provides recommendations for best practices. Overall, this is an impressive and highly beneficial study that is based on convincing evidence and has the potential of setting standards in this rapidly growing field.

Reviewed by eLife

Host and antibiotic jointly select for greater virulence in Staphylococcus aureus

1. Michelle Su
2. Kim L Hoang
3. McKenna Penley
4. Michelle H Davis
5. Jennifer D Gresham
6. Levi T Morran
7. Timothy D Read

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study examines the evolution of virulence and antibiotic resistance in Staphylococcus aureus under multiple selection pressures, specifically host immune function and antibiotic exposure. The evidence presented is convincing, supported by rigorous phenotypic and genomic data from within-host evolution experiments. The manuscript now provides a nuanced and robust interpretation of how pathogens adapt to complex selective landscapes.

Reviewed by eLife

A protein interactome for the last eukaryotic common ancestor illuminates the biochemical basis of modern genetic diseases

1. Rachael M. Cox
2. Ophelia Papoulas
3. Shirlee Shril
4. Chanjae Lee
5. Tynan Gardner
6. Zoya Ansari
7. Anna M. Battenhouse
8. Muyoung Lee
9. Kevin Drew
10. Claire D. McWhite
11. David Yang
12. Janelle C. Leggere
13. Dannie Durand
14. Friedhelm Hildebrandt
15. John B. Wallingford
16. Edward M. Marcotte

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

The emergence of medusa-specific cell states in the scyphozoan Aurelia coerulea

1. Oliver Link
2. Stefan M. Jahnel
3. Kristin Janicek
4. Daniel Guerguerian
5. Johanna Kraus
6. Juan D. Montenegro
7. Bob Zimmerman
8. Brittney Wick
9. Konstantin Khalturin
10. Alison G. Cole
11. Ulrich Technau

Reviewed by Review Commons

Population structure can reduce clonal interference when sexual reproduction and dispersal are synchronized

1. Qihan Liu
2. Daniel B. Weissman

Reviewed by Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology

Evolution of sideways locomotion in crabs

1. Junya Taniguchi
2. Tsubasa Inoue
3. Kano Kohara
4. Jung-Fu Huang
5. Atsushi Hirai
6. Nobuaki Mizumoto
7. Fumio Takeshita
8. Yuuki Kawabata

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

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

Reviewed by eLife

The adaptive landscapes of three global Escherichia coli transcriptional regulators

1. Cauã Antunes Westmann
2. Leander Goldbach
3. Andreas Wagner

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study maps the genotype-phenotype landscapes of three E. coli transcription factors and the topographical features of these landscapes. It shows that ruggedness and epistasis do not hinder the evolution of strong transcription factor binding sites. These convincing findings contribute important insights into fitness landscape theories and highlight the role of chance, contingency, and evolutionary biases in gene regulation. The authors then study the topographical features of these landscapes, especially the number and distribution of local maxima, as well as the statistical properties of evolutionary paths on these landscapes.

Reviewed by eLife