In biology, coevolution occurs when two or more species reciprocally affect each other's evolution through the process of natural selection. The term sometimes is used for two traits in the same species affecting each other's evolution, as well as gene-culture coevolution.
Charles Darwin mentioned evolutionary interactions between flowering plants and insects in On the Origin of Species (1859). Although he did not use the word coevolution, he suggested how plants and insects could evolve through reciprocal evolutionary changes. Naturalists in the late 1800s studied other examples of how interactions among species could result in reciprocal evolutionary change. Beginning in the 1940s, plant pathologists developed breeding programs that were examples of human-induced coevolution. Development of new crop plant varieties that were resistant to some diseases favored rapid evolution in pathogen populations to overcome those plant defenses. That, in turn, required the development of yet new resistant crop plant varieties, producing an ongoing cycle of reciprocal evolution in crop plants and diseases that continues to this day.
Coevolution as a major topic for study in nature expanded rapidly from the 1960s, when Daniel H. Janzen showed coevolution between acacias and ants (see below) and Paul R. Ehrlich and Peter H. Raven suggested how coevolution between plants and butterflies may have contributed to the diversification of species in both groups. The theoretical underpinnings of coevolution are now well-developed (e.g., the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution), and demonstrate that coevolution can play an important role in driving major evolutionary transitions such as the evolution of sexual reproduction or shifts in ploidy. More recently, it has also been demonstrated that coevolution can influence the structure and function of ecological communities, the evolution of groups of mutualists such as plants and their pollinators, and the dynamics of infectious disease.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Explores predicting protein structure from sequence data and inferring interaction partners through Direct Coupling Analysis and the Iterative Pairing Algorithm.
Insects (from Latin insectum) are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (head, thorax and abdomen), three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes and one pair of antennae. Their blood is not totally contained in vessels; some circulates in an open cavity known as the haemocoel. Insects are the most diverse group of animals; they include more than a million described species and represent more than half of all known living organisms.
Fig wasps are wasps of the superfamily Chalcidoidea which spend their larval stage inside figs. Most are pollinators but others simply feed off the plant. The non-pollinators belong to several groups within the superfamily Chalcidoidea, while the pollinators are in the family Agaonidae. While pollinating fig wasps are gall-makers, the remaining types either make their own galls or usurp the galls of other fig wasps; reports of their being parasitoids are considered dubious.
Pollination is the transfer of pollen from an anther of a plant to the stigma of a plant, later enabling fertilisation and the production of seeds, most often by an animal or by wind. Pollinating agents can be animals such as insects, birds, and bats; water; wind; and even plants themselves, when self-pollination occurs within a closed flower. Pollination often occurs within a species. When pollination occurs between species, it can produce hybrid offspring in nature and in plant breeding work.
The Global Arctic MOOC introduces you the dynamics between global changes and changes in the Arctic. This course aims to highlight the effects of climate change in the Polar region. In turn, it will u
Learn about the principles of management of urban infrastructures in the era of Smart Cities. The introduction of Smart urban technologies into legacy infrastructures has already resulted and will con
Learn about the principles of management of urban infrastructures in the era of Smart Cities. The introduction of Smart urban technologies into legacy infrastructures has already resulted and will con
The goal of this course is to learn to analyze a scientific paper critically, asking whether the data presented support the conclusions that are drawn. The analysis is presented in the form of a summa
Despite the structural and functional information contained in the statistical coupling between pairs of residues in a protein, coevolution associated with function is often obscured by artifactual signals such as genetic drift, which shapes a protein's ph ...
NATURE PORTFOLIO2022
Purpose This paper aims to discuss the nexus between two societal (sub) systems of housing and energy supply to shed new light on the key institutional barriers to socio-technical energy transition in the built environment. The key research question is to ...
EMERALD GROUP PUBLISHING LTD2019
,
As cities continue to expand it has become crucial to describe their evolution in time and space. Building on analogies with biological systems, we propose a minimalist reaction-diffusion model coupled with economic constraints and an adaptive transport ne ...