Evolutionary Biology

Migration without interbreeding: Evolutionary history of a highly selfing Mediterranean grass inferred from whole genomes

1. Christoph Stritt
2. Elena L. Gimmi
3. Michele Wyler
4. Abdelmonaim H. Bakali
5. Aleksandra Skalska
6. Robert Hasterok
7. Luis A. J. Mur
8. Nicola Pecchioni
9. Anne C. Roulin

• Curated by eLife

  Summary: This paper has several strengths. It addresses Brachypodium distachyon population genetics and demography to help understand phenomena that have been investigated in less data-rich papers before. The authors do so with whole-genome sequencing of both a pre-existing global collection and additional "gap-filling" sampling. Analyses have been conducted using best practices, and most of the conclusions reflect the data and analyses presented.

  Major findings include the existence of large-scale population structure with three distinct lineages, discordance between geographical occurrence and genetic relatedness (clades within the lineages), and at shorter geographic scales, signs of dispersal without interbreeding. These patterns are explained by a combination of near-complete selfing and seed dispersal.

  The work attempts to cover a lot of ground, including selfing, seed dispersal, coalescence theory, microevolution, plasticity and frequency dependent selection, all mentioned in the abstract. The presentation would probably benefit from focusing on one or two aspects and making a stronger case for them.

  The reviewers noted that studies of this kind will often be descriptive due to the largely untestable nature of complex hypotheses of historical dispersal and evolution. Direct empirical testing of some of the hypotheses put forward here would require substantial experimental work (e.g. measuring the fitness of artificial hybrids to demonstrate post-zygotic reproductive isolation). As a first pass, simulations would likely suffice to test whether processes such as drift, selfing, and founder effects are sufficient to explain the population structure, or whether more complex processes such as frequency-dependent selection or reproductive isolation need to be invoked.

Reviewed by eLife

Positive selection within the genomes of SARS-CoV-2 and other Coronaviruses independent of impact on protein function

1. Alejandro Berrio
2. Valerie Gartner
3. Gregory A. Wray

Reviewed by PeerJ, ScreenIT

The population genetics of collateral resistance and sensitivity

1. Sarah M Ardell
2. Sergey Kryazhimskiy

Reviewed by eLife

On the emergence of P-Loop NTPase and Rossmann enzymes from a Beta-Alpha-Beta ancestral fragment

1. Liam M Longo
2. Jagoda Jabłońska
3. Pratik Vyas
4. Manil Kanade
5. Rachel Kolodny
6. Nir Ben-Tal
7. Dan S Tawfik

Reviewed by Review Commons

Fitness variation across subtle environmental perturbations reveals local modularity and global pleiotropy of adaptation

1. Grant Kinsler
2. Kerry Geiler-Samerotte
3. Dmitri A Petrov

Reviewed by eLife

Evolutionary transcriptomics implicates HAND2 in the origins of implantation and regulation of gestation length

1. Mirna Marinić
2. Katelyn Mika
3. Sravanthi Chigurupati
4. Vincent J Lynch

Reviewed by eLife

Rapid molecular evolution of Spiroplasma symbionts of Drosophila

1. Michael Gerth
2. Humberto Martinez-Montoya
3. Paulino Ramirez
4. Florent Masson
5. Joanne S. Griffin
6. Rodolfo Aramayo
7. Stefanos Siozios
8. Bruno Lemaitre
9. Mariana Mateos
10. Gregory D. D. Hurst

Reviewed by eLife

The adaptive architecture is shaped by population ancestry and not by selection regime

1. Kathrin A. Otte
2. Viola Nolte
3. François Mallard
4. Christian Schlötterer

Reviewed by eLife

On the evolution of chaperones and cochaperones and the expansion of proteomes across the Tree of Life

1. Mathieu E. Rebeaud
2. Saurav Mallik
3. Pierre Goloubinoff
4. Dan S. Tawfik

Reviewed by Review Commons

Evolutionary phenome-genome analysis of cranial suture closure in mammals

1. Borja Esteve-Altava
2. Fabio Barteri
3. Xavier Farré
4. Gerard Muntané
5. Juan Francisco Pastor
6. Arcadi Navarro

Reviewed by eLife