Heritable microbes profoundly influence insect biology, yet the traits they confer often evolve rapidly and differ among closely related symbiont s...

SyeA was present in the Buchnera ancestor, is secreted into the host cytoplasm, is homologous to secreted effectors of bacterial pathogens and is essential for Buchnera transmission.

Egan et al. report the discovery of a new trophic interaction in nature whereby a parasitic plant attacks multiple species of insects that manipulate plant tissue when the two co-occur on a shared pri...

YouTube video by NASA

Mucormycosis may be triggered by low levels of albumin, the most common blood protein

From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

Nature Communications - It is commonly thought that bacterial species borders tend to be fuzzy, due to frequent exchange of DNA. Here, Diop et al. quantify the patterns of gene flow between core...

Abstract. Microbes coordinate homeostasis in host-associated and environmental ecosystems alike, but the connectivity of these biomes is seldom considered.

Tympanal organs have repeatedly evolved in diverse insects and were thought to be required for auditory perception (1).

In contrast to living organisms, viruses were long thought to lack protein synthesis machinery and instead depend on host factors to translate viral transcripts. Here, we discover that giant DNA virus...

The genome of the Atlas blue butterfly contains ten times more chromosomes than most butterflies, and more than any other known diploid animal. Wright et al. show that this extraordinary karyotype is ...

Cells require highly polymorphic receptors to perform accurate self/non-self recognition. In the amoeba Dicytostelium discoideum, polymorphic TgrB1 & TgrC1 proteins are used to bind sister cells and e...

The near-universal genetic code uses 64 codons to encode the 20 canonical amino acids and protein synthesis. Here we designed and generated Escherichia coli with a 4 Mb synthetic genome in which we re...

Mountain biodiversity reorganizes rapidly as species shift upslope to track temperatures. Pervasive species redistribution poses substantial threats to mountain ecosystems, a phenomenon sometimes desc...

Please complete this form if you are a PI recruiting graduate students for a Fall 2026 start. If you are NOT recruiting, feel free to share the response sheet with prospective students looking for lab...

Characterization of the genetic architecture underlying the 7 pairs of contrasting traits studied by Mendel and the over 70 additional agronomic traits in pea (Pisum sativum) reveals their m...

Further studies are needed to determine whether K2-18b, which orbits a star 120 light-years away, is inhabited, or even habitable.

The advent of clonal multicellularity is a critical evolutionary milestone, seen often in eukaryotes, rarely in bacteria, and only once in archaea. We show that uniaxial compression induces clonal mul...

Nature Reviews Microbiology, Published online: 27 March 2025; doi:10.1038/s41579-025-01164-zIn this Review, Kaltenpoth et al. examine the evolution and function of beneficial symbioses between bacteria and their insect hosts, focusing on their effects on the host fitness and the microbial factors that play a role in the evolution of these symbiotic associations.