Reviews & Analysis

This Perspective discusses how well-established theoretical models of evolution can be adapted to study and generate testable predictions about the evolutionary dynamics of host–microbiota associations.

New experimental evidence suggests that cichlids in Lake Tanganyika exhibit diverse activity patterns, and these differences are associated with variation in unexpected genetic loci.

A longitudinal observational study in a wild meerkat population investigates the pattern of pathogen-mediated selection and provides evidence of an arms race between immune genes and pathogens.

Collateral sensitivity, in which resistance to one antibiotic results in increased sensitivity to another antibiotic, is a strategy to reduce the evolution of antibiotic resistance. This Review discusses evolutionary mechanisms that affect responses to therapies that rely on collateral sensitivity.

Climatic memory complicates interpretation of the relationship between plant productivity and precipitation. We find that the influence of preceding-year precipitation on plant productivity is comparable to that of current-year precipitation. The lagged precipitation effect varies with aridity and exerts a positive influence in dry regions and a negative influence in wet regions.

Geochemical chronologies in surface increments and exposed cross-sections of naturally fractured hominin enamel from the South African sites of Swartkrans and Kromdraai indicate that Paranthropus robustus exploited both forest and grassland habitats, and that individuals did not move on the landscape in a manner analogous to extant African apes.

A decade after a marine epidemic killed off sea stars and triggered ecosystem-wide effects along the Pacific Coast of North America, researchers have identified the bacterial pathogen that is responsible for sea star wasting disease.

Vegetation responses to water limitation are difficult to predict owing to large variation across space and time. Our global analysis of soil moisture dynamics reveals that plant water-use strategies vary systematically by ecosystem type in response to recent ecological and climatic conditions.

An in-depth analysis of the breastbone (sternum) of bird ancestors reveals its importance in the origin and evolution of flight in dinosaurs as they evolved into birds.

Interspecies comparative analyses of single-cell transcriptomic data reveal that a proximal limb gene program is reactivated during bat wing formation. Our results illustrate how evolutionary innovations can arise from the reutilization of an existing gene set, activated through species-specific regulatory repertoires.

Convolutional neural networks and genetic association analysis decode the evolution of colour pattern diversity and its underlying complex genetic architecture in the Trinidadian guppy.

A theoretical approach quantifies the drivers of community variability in simulated and natural plant communities, which sheds light on the mechanisms that underlie biodiversity–ecosystem stability relationships.

Analysis of land–atmosphere water and CO₂ fluxes suggests that reduced water use by vegetation, rather than increased carbon uptake, is the driving factor behind the well-documented increase in vegetation water-use efficiency in response to rising atmospheric CO₂.

Genomic and phenotypic analysis of a global invasive plant pinpoints large-effect haplotype blocks involved in parallel local adaptation and invasion success across continents, underscoring a contribution of putative structural variants to rapid evolution.

Using theoretical and empirical analyses, we demonstrate that species synchrony itself and its relationships with species diversity and competition strength could exhibit opposite patterns in short versus long time series. This finding challenges the implicit assumption in ecological studies that observational length should not qualitatively alter patterns of interest.

Mycobacterium lepromatosis genomes associated with 4,000-year-old human skeletons in Chile establish an American origin for this causal agent of leprosy (also known as Hansen’s disease), and point to different evolutionary trajectories and transmission pathways for M. lepromatosis and its sister pathogen Mycobacterium leprae.

Climatic conditions from the northwestern European margins indicate that warmer summer conditions after the last cold glacial period existed there around 15,200 years ago. The presence of prey species in this landscape, combined with warmer summer conditions, presented an environment that supported the reoccupation of these northern marginal latitudes by Late Upper Palaeolithic humans.

Single-cell analysis of placental transcriptomes across species reveals the evolutionary divergence and crosstalk of maternal and fetal cell types during early mammalian evolution.

Plankton models have crucial applications in ecosystem management and climate change projections. This Perspective suggests that stronger alignment of plankton models with empirical knowledge is needed and recommends steps to close the gap between empirical research and modelling.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry Walter Bates, an English naturalist who formally introduced ‘mimicry’ as a scientific concept. We asked a range of researchers working on mimicry across biological systems to reflect on emerging questions in the field.