Article
Ecology
Eniko Szep, Himani Sachdeva, Nicholas H. Barton
Summary: This article analyzes conditions for local adaptation in a metapopulation with infinitely many islands, under a model of hard selection. It shows that the conditions for local adaptation are more restrictive for traits with more polygenic loci in rare habitats. Demographic stochasticity is highlighted as exacerbating the decline of maladapted populations, leading to population collapse in the rare habitat at significantly lower migration rates than predicted by deterministic arguments.
Article
Ecology
Jiaqi Tan, Julia E. Kerstetter, Martin M. Turcotte
Summary: The study demonstrates the eco-evolutionary dynamics between the microbiome and a constituent member in influencing the fitness of the host plant. The presence of microbiome promotes rapid evolution of specific member, leading to changes in microbiome species composition and impacting host fitness.
NATURE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
(2021)
Review
Ecology
Jelena H. Pantel, Lutz Becks
Summary: While the reciprocal effects of ecological and evolutionary dynamics on biodiversity are recognized as important, detecting and understanding these feedbacks remains challenging due to their occurrence at different scales and levels of organization. Recent advances in statistical methods and hypothesis testing provide a promising approach to identifying eco-evolutionary drivers even in non-model systems. This literature review discusses these advances and the challenges of fitting mechanistic models to eco-evolutionary data.
TRENDS IN ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
(2023)
Article
Plant Sciences
Violeta Angulo, Nicolas Beriot, Edisa Garcia-Hernandez, Erqin Li, Raul Masteling, Jennifer A. Lau
Summary: Both plants and their associated microbiomes can respond strongly to global environmental changes, leading to eco-evolutionary feedbacks. Understanding the dynamics of plant-microbe eco-evolution can inform conservation and agriculture.
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Laura S. Zamorano, Zachariah Gompert, Emanuel A. Fronhofer, Jeffrey L. Feder, Patrik Nosil
Summary: There is increasing evidence that evolution and ecology can operate on the same time-scale, with evolution influencing ecological processes and vice versa. However, direct empirical evidence for eco-evolutionary feedback is rare. This study shows in the wild that a plant-feeding arthropod community exhibits a negative feedback loop between adaptation in cryptic coloration, bird predation, and arthropod abundance, suggesting that eco-evolutionary feedbacks can stabilize complex systems.
Review
Microbiology
Bryden Fields, Ville-Petri Friman
Summary: Microbial communities play a crucial role in plant health and productivity, and the rapid evolution of microbes in the rhizosphere has significant impacts on the ecological dynamics within and between plant generations. Understanding how evolution shapes the plant-microbe ecosystem functioning and recognizing the importance of intraspecies diversity are essential in harnessing the benefits of soil microbes for sustainable agriculture.
CURRENT OPINION IN MICROBIOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Ecology
Peter Nabutanyi, Meike J. Wittmann
Summary: The research emphasizes that smaller populations lose genetic diversity more quickly, potentially leading to slower population growth and increased vulnerability to genetic loss. Quantitative eco-evolutionary models are proposed to link genetic diversity loss and population decline, identifying strong interactions between population size and genetic diversity. The study describes the characteristics of the eco-evolutionary extinction vortex and suggests that classical early-warning signals are limited in detecting populations undergoing such a vortex.
AMERICAN NATURALIST
(2021)
Review
Biology
Wolfgang Stephan
Summary: Evolutionary adaptation after sudden environmental changes can occur rapidly due to strong positive directional selection and polygenic selection, or a combination of both. Recent studies highlight the major selective forces and genetic architecture of quantitative traits, while also analyzing the factors limiting the speed of adaptation, such as random genetic drift and demography due to finite population size.
Article
Chemistry, Multidisciplinary
Kai Liu, Alex Blokhuis, Chris van Ewijk, Armin Kiani, Juntian Wu, Wouter H. Roos, Sijbren Otto
Summary: Darwinian evolution involves inheritance and selection of variations in reproducing entities. The replicating entities can affect their environment, generating reciprocal feedback on evolutionary dynamics. The onset of such eco-evolutionary dynamics marks a stepping stone in the transition from chemistry to biology.
Editorial Material
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Andrew P. Hendry
Summary: Ecological change and evolution have a feedback mechanism where ecological change influences evolution, and in turn, evolution affects ecological change. A study using Timema stick insects demonstrates the existence of such feedbacks in nature, showing that they can occur rapidly, have a strong impact, and contribute to stability.
Article
Biology
Victor Boussange, Loic Pellissier
Summary: This study investigates the impact of habitat connectivity and heterogeneity on phenotypic differentiation using a stochastic eco-evolutionary model. The research reveals that both low connectivity and heterogeneity promote neutral differentiation, while habitat assortativity drives differentiation under habitat-dependent selection. The study establishes fundamental links between landscape features and phenotypic differentiation, providing insights into how habitat connectivity and heterogeneity affect differentiation.
COMMUNICATIONS BIOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Ecology
Masato Yamamichi, Theo Gibbs, Jonathan M. Levine
Summary: This study suggests that rapid evolution occurring concurrently with competition may enable species coexistence. The authors extend the interpretation of modern coexistence theory metrics to systems where competitors evolve, defining eco-evolutionary versions of these metrics. They find that the eco-evolutionary niche and competitive ability differences are a combination of ecological and evolutionary processes, accurately predicting the potential for stable coexistence in eco-evolutionary dynamics.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Akihiko Mougi
Summary: Microbes interact with their environment by modifying it and reacting to these modifications, and recent research has shown that the ecological consequences of these interactions can be predicted from their effects on pH. Adaptation of pH niche can affect microbial coexistence, but the mechanisms underlying this effect are not yet understood. This study demonstrates that ecological theory may have difficulty in accurately predicting ecological consequences when there are adaptive changes in pH niche.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)
Article
Ecology
Sebastien Lion, Akira Sasaki, Mike Boots
Summary: Understanding the interaction between ecological processes and evolutionary dynamics of quantitative traits in natural systems is a challenge. Two main theoretical frameworks, adaptive dynamics and quantitative genetics, have strengths and limitations and are used by different research communities. To make progress, a novel theoretical framework called 'oligomorphic dynamics' is proposed to bridge the gap between these approaches and strengthen the link to empirical data. Oligomorphic dynamics considers environmental feedback and can analyze eco-evolutionary dynamics, including multimodal trait distributions and non-normal or skewed distributions encountered in nature, facilitating a tighter integration between theory and data.
Article
Ecology
Philippe Cherabier, Regis Ferriere
Summary: The response of ocean primary production to climate warming is affected by microbial loop activity and bacterial adaptation, which can reverse the negative impacts of climate warming through bacterial adaptation.
Article
Ecology
Jason Bertram, Joanna Masel
THEORETICAL POPULATION BIOLOGY
(2019)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Kun Xiong, Alex K. Lancaster, Mark L. Siegal, Joanna Masel
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2019)
Article
Genetics & Heredity
Jason Bertram, Joanna Masel
Article
Evolutionary Biology
Kendra M. Meer, Paul G. Nelson, Kun Xiong, Joanna Masel
GENOME BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2020)
Article
Evolutionary Biology
Karina Zile, Christophe Dessimoz, Yannick Wurm, Joanna Masel
GENOME BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2020)
Article
Biology
Kevin Gomez, Jason Bertram, Joanna Masel
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2020)
Article
Biology
Jennifer E. James, Sara M. Willis, Paul G. Nelson, Catherine Weibel, Luke J. Kosinski, Joanna Masel
Summary: The study found that the reduction in hydrophobic clustering is universal across lineages, while only young animal domains tend to have higher structural disorder. Trends in amino acid composition among ancient domains reflect the order of recruitment into the genetic code, indicating that the composition of contemporary descendants of ancient sequences reflects amino acid availability during the earliest stages of life.
Article
Genetics & Heredity
Kun Xiong, Mark Gerstein, Joanna Masel
Summary: Transcriptional regulatory networks (TRNs) exhibit certain motifs, with type 1 incoherent feed-forward loops (I1FFLs) and negative feedback loops (NFBLs) being common solutions. The evolution of these motifs is influenced by selection conditions, with I1FFLs generally evolving more frequently than NFBLs. The evolutionary accessibility and not just relative functionality shape motif evolution in TRNs, with the expression levels of specific genes playing a crucial role.
Article
Evolutionary Biology
Cuong Cao Dang, Bui Quang Minh, Hanon McShea, Joanna Masel, Jennifer Eleanor James, Le Sy Vinh, Robert Lanfear
Summary: This study introduces a new maximum likelihood method, nQMaker, that can estimate time nonreversible amino acid substitution models and rooted phylogenetic trees. The results show that the nonreversible models estimated with nQMaker are a better fit to empirical alignments than pre-existing reversible models, and the improvements in model fit scale with the size of the data set.
SYSTEMATIC BIOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Ecology
Thomas Bataillon, Thomas H. G. Ezard, Michael Kopp, Joanna Masel
Article
Evolutionary Biology
Luke J. Kosinski, Nathan R. Aviles, Kevin Gomez, Joanna Masel
Summary: Proteins, as the workhorses of the cell, can cause harm through misfolding and aggregation. However, sometimes proteins can be born from noncoding DNA without harm. By studying the fitness of different Escherichia coli lineages expressing unique random peptides, researchers found that simple amino acid frequencies, rather than the ordering of amino acids, predicted lineage fitness. Smaller amino acids that promote intrinsic structural disorder had less harmful effects on fitness. These amino acids were also enriched in young animal proteins.
GENOME BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2022)
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Jennifer E. James, Paul G. Nelson, Joanna Masel
Summary: Protein domains that emerged recently have higher disorder and clustering of hydrophobic residues. There is a hypothesis that different levels of selection affect the retention probabilities of domains with different properties. Loss rates were inferred for animal Pfam domains and were found to depend on disorder and clustering trait values. The results support the hypothesis that domain loss slowly eliminates domains with suboptimal disorder and clustering levels, affecting proteome composition.
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2023)
Article
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Joanna Masel, James Ian Mackie Petrie, Jason Bay, Wolfgang Ebbers, Aalekh Sharan, Scott Michael Leibrand, Andreas Gebhard, Samuel Zimmerman
Summary: Digital contact tracing and notification have not lived up to expectations in combating the COVID-19 pandemic due to multiple points of failure. Research indicates that achieving a significant reduction in transmission risk requires high success rates in technology adoption, contact detection, prompt diagnosis and notification, and behavior change. Recommendations include emphasizing user autonomy, integrating tracing/notification apps with testing, manual contact tracing, and scientific data collection.
JMIR PUBLIC HEALTH AND SURVEILLANCE
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
James Petrie, Joanna Masel
Summary: Targeted quarantine and social distancing measures should be implemented based on current disease prevalence to achieve the optimal balance between controlling transmission and minimizing total social isolation. The value of a quarantine policy increases with lower case counts, is less affected by vaccination unless exemptions are in place, and is greatly enhanced by more information on individual infectiousness risk.
JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INTERFACE
(2021)