In this review, we discuss three meiotic checkpoints—the DNA damage response, the pachytene checkpoint, and the spindle checkpoint—and highlight their similarities and differences across diverse syste...

By doubling their entire genome, organisms can evolve extremely rapidly — or they can lose it all. New studies reveal how to survive the high-risk, high-reward evolutionary event.

Nature Reviews Genetics, Published online: 11 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41576-026-00995-7Hybridization, the exchange of genes between divergent lineages, is now recognized as widespread across eukaryotes and essential to understanding genome evolution. In this Review, Schumer and Rieseberg overview methodological advances facilitating recent progress, reassess the frequency, causes and consequences of hybridization, and highlight key open questions.

Transposable elements (TEs) are a highly diverse group of selfish genomic elements, prevalent across the tree of life, whose uncontrolled propagati...

X-chromosome inactivation (XCI) enables gene dosage compensation in XX eutherians. Long interspersed element-1 (LINE-1 or L1) retrotransposons are unusually abundant on the human X chromosome and are ...

In Metazoa, transposon expression is suppressed by the piRNA pathway, and disruption of this pathway leads to rampant transposon expression. However, it remains unclear whether increased transposon ex...

ALT: Callipterus Cichlid Collecting Shell

Structurally complex regions of the genome are increasingly recognized as engines of evolutionary convergence due to their propensity to generate recurrent gene duplications that give rise to similar ...

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 propagatio...

In this study, long-read RNA sequencing achieves accurate single-nucleotide polymorphism calling, haplotype phasing and allele-specific expression analysis.

Highly efficient hyperthermal acidic proteases combined with hybrid-fragmentation schemes provide five times more unique peptide reads than trypsin or chymotrypsin, greatly boosting confidence in de n...

Nature Reviews Genetics, Published online: 17 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41576-026-00937-3In this Review, Ji et al. overview how rapidly advancing experimental and computational methods are enabling improved and automated annotation of gene structure and function, providing researchers with genome annotation resources of unprecedented scale and resolution.

Associate Professor of Plant Science Salary: Grade 9 (£61,759 - £73,708 p.a, depending on experience)This role will be based on the university campus, with scope for elements of the job to be undertak...

Fragments of aberrant cytoplasmic mRNA pair with nuclear RNAs to augment transcription

Sexual selection acts on heritable differences within species, driving the parallel diversification of signal production in one sex and behavioral res…

Sex biases in admixture and other demographic processes are recurrent features throughout human evolution. For admixture between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (AMHs), sex bias has been p...

Nature Ecology & Evolution - This Review discusses recent advances in the molecular evolution of vertebrate organs, including rates of evolution of organs and cell types, molecular mechanisms...

An international, peer-reviewed genome sciences journal featuring outstanding original research that offers novel insights into the biology of all organisms

The quest to fathom the riotous diversity of nature is absorbingly told in a virtual double biography of the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his contemporary, the count of Buffon.

Nature Reviews Genetics, Published online: 17 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41576-026-00937-3In this Review, Ji et al. overview how rapidly advancing experimental and computational methods are enabling improved and automated annotation of gene structure and function, providing researchers with genome annotation resources of unprecedented scale and resolution.

NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: Notice of Temporary Extension to Early-Stage Investigator (ESI) Eligibility Period NOT-OD-26-020. OD

Nature Reviews Genetics, Published online: 16 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41576-026-00935-5Gene duplication is a key evolutionary mechanism, as initially redundant paralogues diverge over time. The authors review how adaptive and non-adaptive forces influence the evolutionary fates of gene duplicates, highlighting the importance of function–fitness relationships and gene expression dynamics.