Evolution is a stochastic process, and given the amount of data generated in biological sciences today, there is a pressing need for people with a quantitative background to understand and contribute ...

Journal of Evolutionary Biology

Interbreeding with tomatoes 9 million years ago gave potatoes the genes to develop tubers

The Academy report, funded by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, examines the origins and trajectory of early microbial life to inform and inspire future research.

Background Environments shape adaptive trajectories of populations, often leading to adaptive parallelism in identical, and divergence in different environments. However, how does the likelihood of th...

npj Biofilms and Microbiomes - Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities

Microbial communities provide crucial services for human well-being, driving an interest in designing and controlling them towards optimised or novel …

Conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution, from populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements in microbes. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-r...

A recent study demonstrated the existence of mutations that facilitate access to efficient evolutionary solutions. Here I discuss the implications of this finding and the potential to open a new chapter in the study of evolvability.

Research on so-called mirror cells, which defy fundamental properties of living organisms, should be prohibited as too dangerous, biologists said.

The current “consensus” order in which amino acids were added to the genetic code is based on potentially biased criteria, such as the absence of s...