Evolutionary Biology

Ecological diversification in rapidly evolving populations

1. Daniel PGH Wong
2. Benjamin H Good

• Curated by eLife

  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.

Reviewed by eLife

Species biology and demographic history determine species vulnerability to climate change in tropical island endemic birds

1. Ratnesh Karjee
2. Vikram Iyer
3. Durbadal Chatterjee
4. Rajasri Ray
5. Kritika M Garg
6. Balaji Chattopadhyay

• Curated by eLife

  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.

Reviewed by eLife

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

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