Articles tagged Evolution
(106 results)

When an eastern diamondback rattlesnake bites its prey, it injects a cocktail of toxic proteins and peptides that attack on multiple fronts. These toxins destroy blood vessels, block the blood clotting cascade, cause necrosis, and inflict crippling pain. But the precise recipe for this noxious mix is generally thought to depend on where the snake…

Laboratory zebrafish hide a dirty little secret. Although the tiny fish have proven to be a vital model of vertebrate development and disease genetics, zebrafish reproduction—at least in the lab—has wildly variable outcomes. Offspring sex ratios can vary from extremely male-biased to extremely female-biased, depending on which breeding pairs serve as parents. The reason for…

Mammal domestication is a hot topic, with many groups releasing detailed genetic studies of different models of domestication. This week we’ll look at the genetics of cat colors and follow up on the recently published domestication syndrome hypothesis. Next week we’ll feature new research on experimental rat domestication. Stay tuned! Does your cat have a…

How does evolution rewire an animal’s sensory system? In time for both National Bat Week and Halloween, new research in G3 investigates this question by comparing the genomes of bat species that “see” the world in different ways. The black flying fox Pteropus alecto forages for fruit mainly by smell and sight. In contrast, the…

In Stellenbosch, South Africa, in the shade of the university botanical gardens, Adam Wilkins and Richard Wrangham drank coffee and worked their way through a list. Tameness. Smaller muzzles. Smaller teeth. Patches of white fur. Floppy ears. In early 2011, Wilkins, Perspectives editor at GENETICS, and Wrangham, primatologist at Harvard, were both spending the semester…

Y chromosomes have come and gone many times during evolutionary history. Take beetles. When Heath Blackmon and Jeff Demuth modeled sex chromosome evolution in more than a thousand beetle species, they found the Y chromosome had independently evolved around 65 times in the suborder Adephaga alone. And as fast as this group evolved new Y chromosomes,…

In Eurasia, humans once had Neanderthals for neighbors. That time of co-existence seems to have left its marks in our genome; non-Africans today share more genetic variants with Neanderthals than Africans do. But does this really mean there was interbreeding between humans and the Hominids next door? Some have previously proposed an alternative explanation for that…