The selfish ribosome In this Essay, the evolution of life is construed as a ribosomal takeover, whereby the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensured the…

Could the #ribosome be a selfish element? @mkrupovic.bsky.social & Eugene Koonin propose that the #evolution of life can viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources.
🧪 #OriginsOfLife

📣 EvolDir is now managed by @eseb.bsky.social!

We are delighted to be taking the reins and express our gratitude to both Brian Golding who began this service to the community in the mid-1980s and to @rdmpage.bsky.social who ran this account until now 👏

You can now find evoldir here: evoldir.net

Thrilled to have been able to review 'The Paradox of the Organism: Adaptation and Internal Conflict', a volume edited by @arvidagren.bsky.social & Manus Patten.

"...the reality that complex organisms function at all feels like pure magic, with the powers of molecular evolution behind the curtain."

What good is modeling? Introducing biology students to theory Theory and empirical science should be in constant dialogue, but often find it hard to understand one another. Here we describe a graduate-level university course we developed to improve matters. The ...

Preprint: What good is modeling? Introducing biology students to theory - arxiv.org/abs/2604.13344 - how to teach and think about what modeling contributes to science. How does it fit into the scientific method? This is often misunderstood.

Emergent frequency-dependent selection predicts mutation outcomes in complex ecological communities www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

my students bought me this adorable little blue crab plushy 🥹

Whoa—machine learning strikes again (in a good way)

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Gene-level complexity explains genome-wide variation in the distribution of fitness effects www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Background check: Mutational input to size variation depends on ancestor's breeding value www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Comparison of the Distribution of Fitness Effects Across Primates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

Two models for the nature of pleiotropy in adaptation. Left: Schematic of the environmental structure in this study. Environments can be mapped onto a multidimensional environment space characterized by chemical and physical compositions. The large green circle represents an environment where adaptive mutants evolved, and the large pink circle is a distant environment. Around each base, a set of identical environmental perturbations (arrows) is applied, generating clusters of similar environments around distinct base environments. Top right: Schematic of fitnotype map for adaptive mutants near their home base environment. By measuring fitness in each of the green environments, one can infer how many fitnotypes matter for this set of mutants in their home environment. Here, only four of the possible 8 fitnotypes matter. Bottom right: When the mutants are moved to the distant base environment, and their fitness is measured in all pink environments (base and perturbations), there are two possibilities. Either more fitnotypes become important and the space appears higher-dimensional (left, pleiotropic expansion), or the set of fitnotypes that matters remains low-dimensional, but shifts (right, pleiotropic shift).

Predicting the effect of a #mutation on #fitness is hard. @oliviamghosh.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social &co use fitness effects of adaptive yeast mutants to show that underlying genotype-phenotype-fitness maps are low-dimensional but context-dependent @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4dLy2Ez

Allelic Variation at tRNA Genes in Three Nematode Species Indicates Mutation Load Despite Strong Purifying Selection Abstract. Cytosolic transfer RNAs (tRNAs), which are encoded as hundreds of genes in nuclear genomes, experience exceptionally high mutation rates and have

Now published @genomebiolevol.bsky.social: our paper showing that the genes for critical, ancient components of protein synthesis machinery - tRNAs - are bombarded with mutations, leading to remarkable allelic diversity that likely has functional consequences!
academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

Just published: "Improving scientific mentoring with history and philosophy of science" (open access)

With my good friends and colleagues Alan Love and Tobias Uller.

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Transcript diversity reflects deleterious RNA processing errors shaped by population size in metazoans Alternative transcription initiation, splicing and polyadenylation generate extensive transcript diversity in eukaryotes, but its evolutionary significance has been disputed. This study analyses 166 t...

Back in the noughties when I was an academic, my lab did quite a bit of work on (conserved) alternative transcripts. This study in @plosbiology.org presents compelling evidence that most alternative transcripts are deleterious noise journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Crabs are cannibalizing one another with surprising rapacity in parts of the Chesapeake Bay A 37-year study in the Chesapeake Bay revealed that a major predator of young blue crabs might be their own kind

A 37-year study in the Chesapeake Bay revealed that a major predator of young blue crabs might be their own kind

Intraspecific genome size variation is attributed to adaptive silencing of transposable elements in Hordeum species Abstract. A substantial variation in genome size has been observed among individuals of the same species. Theory predicts that increased genome size may co

Potapenko et al. studied two species of barley, finding that TE silencing is central to genome size regulation, with selection maintaining smaller genomes among individuals with higher fitness in favorable habitats.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag051

#evobio #molbio #TEsky #PlantSky

Bridging developmental and statistical approaches to variation and evolution | PNAS Phenotypic variation is the raw material for evolutionary diversification and adaptation. However, a critical gap remains in evolutionary theory be...

How does development shape the variation evolution can act on?

In our new paper in @pnas.org , we bridge developmental dynamics and quantitative genetics, linking dynamical models of phenotype formation with the statistical parameters used to study evolutionary change

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The American Naturalist classic cover

Evolution is faster with stronger selection, but this may come with a demographic cost. Xu & Osmond characterized conditions when the chance of evolutionary rescue increases with the strength of selection across different scenarios.

Read now ahead of print!
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Clonal-aggregative multicellularity tuned by salinity in a choanoflagellate - Nature The choanoflagellate Choanoeca flexa forms motile and contractile cell monolayers purely clonally, purely aggregatively or through a combination of both processes depending on environmental conditions.

A study in Nature shows that the single-celled form of a tiny, aquatic organism can turn into a multicellular version by three different routes. The discovery adds insight to the possible origins of multicellular life, suggesting a previously unrecognized degree of flexibility. 🧪

MBE | The evolutionary genomics of meiotic drive Meiotic drivers gain transmission advantages by distorting equal, Mendelian segregation. This review discusses the evolutionary genomics of meiotic drive. The figure highlights the interactions of meiotic drive elements with other classes of selfish genetic elements including: direct interactions between drivers and transposable elements (TEs) (A) or satellites (C) that can facilitate the spread of drivers; other drive systems that cause the mutual destruction of all gametes (B; e.g. the presence of multiple toxin-antidote systems); indirect interactions where the host machinery responsible for silencing TEs are recruited to silence drivers (D); dosage-sensitive interactions involving sex-linked drivers that result in gene amplifications (E); and tradeoffs between suppressing drive and TEs (F).

For a new MBE Review, Presgraves et al. argue that many features of genome evolution, content, and organization seemingly inexplicable by adaptation or nearly neutral processes are instead best accounted for by meiotic drive.

🔗 academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

#evobio #molbio

Frequencies of unique and repeated innovations through time. Light gray = unique; dark gray = repeated; black = total. (A) Raw data. (B) Normalized for period duration.

Local and time evolving ergodicity of mollusk evolution:
"We interpret this finding to mean that molluscan evolutionary history has become substantially more predictable over time despite increasing diversity"
www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

Private money cannot replace public funding of science Who should pay for American science? In the current political climate, many are looking to the private sector to compensate for cuts in public funding. At the Harvard School of Public Health—particula...

A response to the opinion that private $ can replace the NIH.

Businesses are not charities. They work on profit margins. Decades of $ is essential for research to progress from an initial discovery to treatment. Most of the dirty work goes on in academic labs.

🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

NSF officials break silence on how AI and quantum now drive agency grantmaking Leaders acknowledge White House role in controversial moves

The National Science Foundation is systematically being converted to the National AI and Quantum Research Foundation.

“I see it as the administration exerting political control over what has traditionally been NSF’s ability to fund the best science.”

Genomic Perplexity and the Evolution of Context-Dependent Function Abstract. The fundamental principle that selection acts on a gene’s function often assumes implicitly that this function is fixed and intrinsic. However, e

New paper out in MBE! 🧵
"Genomic Perplexity and the Evolution of Context-Dependent Function"
The big idea: genes don't have fixed functions. Function emerges from context - genomic, cellular, environmental. And we can quantify this. academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

The mutation landscape of Daphnia obtusa reveals evolutionary forces shaping genome stability Abstract. Spontaneous mutations are the primary source of genetic variation and play a central role in shaping evolutionary processes. To investigate mutat

Deng et al. assembled the first chromosome-level reference genome for Daphnia obtusa and deep sequenced eight mutation-accumulation lines for ~500 generations, assessing the interplay among mutation, selection, and genome stability.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molb...

#evobio #molbio

Have we leapt into commercial genetic testing without understanding it? A new book argues that tests might reshape human diversity even if they don't work.

arstechnica.com/science/2026...

"In What We Inherit: How New Technologies and Old Myths Are Shaping Our Genomic Future, we get to see how their collaboration can shed light on our rapidly advancing genetic capabilities."

Migratory bird stopover patterns linked to urbanization and social landscapes - Nature Cities Urban ecology traditionally focuses on single cities, yet cities play key roles in ecological processes such as migration. Radar analysis across the continental USA reveals that nearly half of stopove...

A study I led came out in Nature Cities yesterday!

We used radar to study the role that urban landscapes play in migratory bird stopover. Spoiler: birds use cities a lot, and the patterns of their use reflect social processes and the inequities embedded in them.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

There Is Grandeur in the Math of Life In the preface to The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, a foundational text of population genetics, Fisher (1930) speculated about differences between

Another great book review in BioScience.

This time by Nick Bailey who discusses Noah Rosenberg's"Mathematical Properties of Population-Genetic Statistics: Quadratic Forms Most Beautiful" from @princetonupress.bsky.social.

academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Beyond Mendel: a call to revisit the genotype–phenotype map through new experimental paradigms Abstract. The long-standing notion that genotypes map to phenotypes through simple one gene–one trait relationships continues to shape both research in the

New Perspective!🔥It's fascinating how scientists from different fields but interested in the same question [e.g. genotype-phenoytpe relationship] can have such different perspectives. Here we put in our 2 cents wrt genetic effects being context-dependent, and pheno variation being mostly polygenic