Articles tagged Evolution
(101 results)

They rattle as warning, but during the hunt their strike is silent and sudden. Any rabbit or mouse targeted by a rattlesnake is doomed—the snake’s bite carries a paralyzing venom. The toxins in this venom are proteins encoded by a large gene family that arose by gene duplication. In the July issue of GENETICS, Margres…

Humans built the modern world with the help of domestic plants and animals. A byproduct of our many domestication experiments is a series of excellent long-term controlled evolutionary comparisons that are helping geneticists understand adaptation. In a study published in the May issue of G3, Fleming et al. identify genomic regions under natural selection in…

Fascinating discoveries sometimes emerge from the most daunting of experimental roadblocks. Designed to generate over 1,000 recombinant inbred mice lines for genetic mapping, the Collaborative Cross (CC) project unearthed astounding variation in male fertility when nearly 95% of the highly inbred CC lines went extinct. As part of the Multiparental Populations series in the June…

Multiparental populations (MPPs) have brought a new era in mapping complex traits, as well as new analytical challenges. To face these challenges and encourage innovation, the GSA journals launched the ongoing Multiparental Populations series in 2014. This month’s issues of GENETICS and G3 feature a bumper 16 MPP articles, timed to celebrate a new easy-to-use…

Multiparental populations (MPPs) have brought a new era in mapping complex traits, as well as new analytical challenges. To face these challenges and encourage innovation, the GSA journals launched the ongoing Multiparental Populations series in 2014. This month’s issues of GENETICS and G3 feature a bumper 16 MPP articles, timed to celebrate a new easy-to-use…

Two highly similar genes that contribute to drug resistance in a pathogenic yeast have been co-evolving as tandem duplicates for the past 134 million years—while maintaining distinct functions. This is the conclusion of a paper in the April issue of GENETICS by Lamping et al. that examines the evolutionary effects of ectopic gene conversion. Evolutionary…

Thanks to more than a hundred years of working with Drosophila melanogaster, geneticists have many powerful tools for precisely manipulating its genes. It has also become a model system for studying speciation and molecular evolution together with the other members of the melanogaster species group: D. simulans, D. mauritiana, D. yakuba, and D. santomea. However,…

Constant mutation and shaping by natural selection can make the once-identical genomes of isolated populations of organisms very different from one another. This genetic divergence can lead to two such populations no longer being able to interbreed successfully—speciation. In their paper in the March issue of G3, Lamelza and Ailion show that harmful interactions between…

GSA is an official partner of the March for Science—we hope you will join us in marching on Earth Day, April 22! You can now wear one of our fantastic new GSA March for Science T-shirts, available in two designs. All proceeds go to the non-profit, volunteer-run March for Science organization, supporting the major logistics costs…

In the genomic era, population geneticists are flooded with molecular data on the evolution of natural populations. This deluge started in 1966 as a trickle of data from protein electrophoresis studies, including the landmark GENETICS papers published by Richard Lewontin and John Hubby. As Lewontin is honored this week at the Annual Drosophila Research Conference…

We are pleased to announce that Richard C. Lewontin, PhD is the 2017 recipient of the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal for lifetime achievement in the field of genetics. This award recognizes Lewontin’s extensive impact on our understanding of evolution, a broad and deep influence that has shaped the field. An unprecedented 160 distinguished biologists co-signed a…