Adaptive introgression, the transfer of beneficial alleles between species through hybridization, is increasingly recognized as an important source of adaptation to novel environments. However, the th...

An updated phylogeny of bats is presented, based on new genome assemblies and many ancient fossils and including all known bat families.

Why do we not see evolutionary change in heritable, fitness-related traits of free-living populations? This multi-decade study of the evolution of clutch size in populations of great tits before, duri...

Adaptive evolution is essential for populations facing rapid anthropogenic change, yet realized evolutionary responses often fall short of expectations. Us

The ecological and economic threat posed by invasive pests demands proactive mitigation. Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used in efforts to predict where invasive species might spread af...

Have minimal genomic samples from two species and want to infer their demographic history? DemogFit is an R package for fitting four simple likelihood-based demographic models using the distributio...

Gene expression analysis of pigment cells in snake and lizard embryos and comparison with fish and frog shows that progenitors follow different developmental paths in each species yet mature cells pre...

A cognitive adaptation in Heliconius butterflies, accompanied by strikingly divergent changes in two principal insect integration centres, reveals that neural circuits can differ strongly in their propensity...

Chord diagrams can be used to show relationships or flows between and within categories. This blog post introduces ggchord2, a new package that makes it possible to create them using ggplto2 in R.

Nature Ecology & Evolution - Citizen science platforms must mitigate against the threat of generative AI

Temperature is a fundamental determinant of bacterial physiology and ecology. Optimal growth temperature (OGT) is highly variable across species, contributing to differences in where and when species ...

They might fade, but they flap and feed with vigor until they drop dead.

Abstract. Human-induced global climate change and other anthropogenic stressors are fundamentally altering our oceans. Understanding the ecological and soc

Abstract. Environmental genomics has led to the discovery of many new lineages of archaea, including “DPANN” (or Nanobdellati), comprising organisms with s

Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is a key step in phylogenetic analysis, and is prone to error. Unfortunately, algorithms that remove likely alignment errors from MSAs sometimes also remove informati...

LepEU, the European Lepidopteran Population Genomics Consortium, was launched in 2023 to coordinate continental-scale collections and generate population-level genomic data for butterflies and moths ...

Testing this hypothesis with some clever experiments.

People are born with variable numbers of de novo germline mutations (DNMs), depending primarily on the ages of their parents. To explore additional causes, we developed an approach to call DNMs from nucleotide differences between siblings in genomic regions inherited identical by descent from both parents. Applying it to whole genome sequences from 28,985 sibling pairs of diverse genetic ancestries present in the UK Biobank and All of Us datasets, as well as 2,330 trios, we identified >800K autosomal DNMs and characterized mutation phenotypes in 27,645 sets of parents. We found subtle shifts in the mutation spectrum but no differences in total DNM rates among genetic ancestry groups, or between smokers and non-smokers. Testing for associations between parental mutation phenotypes and their burden of loss-of-function and deleterious missense variants in a set of 180 DNA repair and maintenance genes, we discovered that disruptions in REV1 and LIG1 increase germline mutation rates, and thus that rare mutator alleles segregate in population cohorts. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. NIH, R35 GM083098