Genetic Archaeology Research & News
Environments containing species that are distantly related to one another are more productive than those containing closely related species, according to new research from the University of Toronto Scarborough.
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A UK-Canadian team of scientists has discovered ancient pockets of water, which have been isolated deep underground for billions of years and contain abundant chemicals known to support life.
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 | Biologist Deborah M. Gordon's decades-long study of collective behavior in harvester ant colonies has provided a rare real-time look at natural selection at work. ...> Full Article |
Researchers at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle (USA) and the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at the University of Luxembourg have jointly developed a revolutionary method to analyse the genomes of yeast families. The team of Dr. Aimée Dudley from the ISB and Dr. Patrick May from LCSB published their paper in the renowned scientific journal Nature Methods on May 12th. It describes a new method called BEST: Barcode Enabled Sequencing of Tetrads (DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.2479).
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 | Vanderbilt phylogeneticists examined the reasons why large-scale tree-of-life studies are producing contradictory results and have proposed a suite of novel techniques to resolve the conflicts. ...> Full Article |
Investigators from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory today publish studies revealing many previously unknown components of an innate system that defends sex cells -- the carriers of inheritance across generations -- from the ravages of transposable genetic elements.
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 | In contrast to traditional approaches using morphological characters to delimit species, five new lichen-forming fungal species were described from what was traditionally considered a single species using genetic data exclusively. The new species can be identified using DNA barcoding. This pioneering study marks an alternative approach for discovering species and will promote effective research through correct specimen identification in closely related species groups. The study was published in the open access journal Mycokeys. ...> Full Article |
 | A George Washington University biologist and a team of researchers have created the first large-scale evolutionary family tree for every snake and lizard around the globe. ...> Full Article |
 | A carnivorous, cannibalistic tadpole may play a role in understanding the evolution and development of digestive organs, according to research from North Carolina State University. ...> Full Article |
 | From Ireland to the Balkans, Europeans are basically one big family, closely related to one another for the past thousand years, according to a new study of the DNA of people from across the continent. ...> Full Article |
When Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution marine paleoecologist Marco Coolen was mining through vast amounts of genetic data from the Black Sea sediment record, he was amazed about the variety of past plankton species that left behind their genetic makeup (i.e., the plankton paleome).
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Cooperative behavior is widely observed in nature, but there remains the possibility that 'cheaters' can exploit the system, with uncertain consequences for the social unit as a whole. A new study has found that a yeast colony dominated by non-producers ('cheaters') is more likely to face extinction than one consisting entirely of producers ('co-operators'). The findings are the results of the first laboratory demonstration of a full evolutionary-ecological feedback loop in a social microbial population.
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The genome sequences of the soft-shell turtle and green sea turtle offer new clues to the development and evolution of turtle?specific body plan.
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 | A recent revision of the Middle American clade of the ant genus Stenamma provides the description of 40 species, 33 of which are recognized as new to science. The extensive study, published in the open access journal ZooKeys, provides the first thorough examination of the biology and taxonomy of these ants, focusing mainly on the worker caste and describing their peculiar nesting habits. ...> Full Article |
 | Scientists have long observed that species seem to have become increasingly capable of evolving in response to changes in the environment. But computer science researchers now say that the popular explanation of competition to survive in nature may not actually be necessary for evolvability to increase. ...> Full Article |
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