Articles tagged Evolution
(105 results)

Genes involved in male reproduction tend to evolve rapidly. This has been observed in many different species and is thought to be due to sexual selection as males compete over mating opportunities. But in the August issue of GENETICS, Whittle and Extavour present results that flip this paradigm upside down. They find that in the…

In the 1940s, C. H. Waddington discovered a peculiar phenomenon in fruit flies: traits could appear in response to environmental stress in an individual’s lifetime and then be passed down to future generations. Waddington proposed that this wasn’t the inheritance of acquired traits, but actually due to pre-existing genetic variation that had no effect until…

Guest post by Aurora MacRae-Crerar. Hosted at the University of Pennsylvania, this year’s Evolution in Philadelphia Conference (EPiC) aimed to foster collaboration among early career evolutionary biologists. The conference was sponsored in part by the Genetics Society of America (GSA) through its Career Development Symposia program, which supports events that contribute to the career development of early…

Rice is one of the most important food crops on earth. Like many other plants, the genome of this critical global species is dominated by transposable elements—selfish genes that multiply themselves to the detriment of their host. In the June issue of G3, Zhang and Gao analyze the genomic long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposon content…

They rattle as warning, but during the hunt their strike is silent and sudden. Any rabbit or mouse targeted by a rattlesnake is doomed—the snake’s bite carries a paralyzing venom. The toxins in this venom are proteins encoded by a large gene family that arose by gene duplication. In the July issue of GENETICS, Margres…

Humans built the modern world with the help of domestic plants and animals. A byproduct of our many domestication experiments is a series of excellent long-term controlled evolutionary comparisons that are helping geneticists understand adaptation. In a study published in the May issue of G3, Fleming et al. identify genomic regions under natural selection in…

Fascinating discoveries sometimes emerge from the most daunting of experimental roadblocks. Designed to generate over 1,000 recombinant inbred mice lines for genetic mapping, the Collaborative Cross (CC) project unearthed astounding variation in male fertility when nearly 95% of the highly inbred CC lines went extinct. As part of the Multiparental Populations series in the June…

Multiparental populations (MPPs) have brought a new era in mapping complex traits, as well as new analytical challenges. To face these challenges and encourage innovation, the GSA journals launched the ongoing Multiparental Populations series in 2014. This month’s issues of GENETICS and G3 feature a bumper 16 MPP articles, timed to celebrate a new easy-to-use…

Multiparental populations (MPPs) have brought a new era in mapping complex traits, as well as new analytical challenges. To face these challenges and encourage innovation, the GSA journals launched the ongoing Multiparental Populations series in 2014. This month’s issues of GENETICS and G3 feature a bumper 16 MPP articles, timed to celebrate a new easy-to-use…

Two highly similar genes that contribute to drug resistance in a pathogenic yeast have been co-evolving as tandem duplicates for the past 134 million years—while maintaining distinct functions. This is the conclusion of a paper in the April issue of GENETICS by Lamping et al. that examines the evolutionary effects of ectopic gene conversion. Evolutionary…

Thanks to more than a hundred years of working with Drosophila melanogaster, geneticists have many powerful tools for precisely manipulating its genes. It has also become a model system for studying speciation and molecular evolution together with the other members of the melanogaster species group: D. simulans, D. mauritiana, D. yakuba, and D. santomea. However,…