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Background: Reproductive isolation can result from adaptive processes (e.g., ecological speciation and mutation-order speciation) or stochastic processes such as "system drift" model. Ecological speciation predicts barriers to gene flow between populations ...
Genetic variation is the fuel of evolution, with standing genetic variation especially important for short-term evolution and local adaptation. To date, studies of spatiotemporal patterns of genetic variation in natural populations have been challenging, a ...
By combining well-established population genetic theory with high-throughput sequencing data from natural populations, major strides have recently been made in understanding how, why, and when vertebrate populations evolve crypsis. Here, we focus on backgr ...
Mutations are the source of evolutionary variation. The interactions of multiple mutations can have important effects on fitness and evolutionary trajectories. We have recently described the distribution of fitness effects of all single mutations for a nin ...
The understanding of protein evolution depends on the ability to relate the impact of mutations on molecular traits to organismal fitness. Biological activity and robustness have been regarded as important features in shaping protein evolutionary landscape ...
Developmental constraints have been postulated to limit the space of feasible phenotypes and thus shape animal evolution. These constraints have been suggested to be the strongest during either early or mid-embryogenesis, which corresponds to the early con ...
Eukaryotic genomes encode several buffering mechanisms that robustly maintain invariant phenotypic outcome despite fluctuating environmental conditions. Here we show that the Drosophila gut-associated commensals, represented by a single facultative symbion ...
Adaptation lies at the heart of Darwinian evolution. Accordingly, numerous studies have tried to provide a formal framework for the description of the adaptive process. Of these, two complementary modeling approaches have emerged: While so-called adaptive- ...
Transposable elements (TEs) account for at least 50% of the human genome. They constitute essential motors of evolution through their ability to modify genomic architecture, mutate genes and regulate gene expression. Accordingly, TEs are subject to tight e ...
Major climatic and geological events but also population history (secondary contacts) have generated cycles of population isolation and connection of long and short periods. Recent empirical and theoretical studies suggest that fast evolutionary processes ...