Evolution Letters 1st Anniversary Collection – Editors’ Picks

Evol­u­tion Let­ters is cel­eb­rat­ing its first birth­day and so we asked the edit­or­i­al board to think about some of their favour­ite papers from the first year. It was always the aim of the journ­al, and the two soci­et­ies that foun­ded it, to pro­mote the best research in Evol­u­tion­ary Bio­logy. We think the papers we’ve picked do a great job of demon­strat­ing that we are in a golden age of evol­u­tion­ary research.

The two-fold cost of sex: experimental evidence from a natural system

Amanda Gibson, Lynda Delph, & Curtis Lively (published 3^rd May 2017)

Chosen by Kat­rina Lythgoe

This paper is a par­tic­u­lar favour­ite of mine, and not only because it was the first ever paper to be pub­lished in Evol­u­tion Let­ters. Why sexu­al repro­duc­tion is so com­mon in nature, des­pite the so-called “two-fold cost of males”, is one of the most icon­ic ques­tions in evol­u­tion­ary bio­logy. Although the hunt for advant­ages to sex has received huge amounts of atten­tion, the cost of males had nev­er been dir­ectly demon­strated in nat­ur­al sys­tems. By rear­ing aquat­ic snails from nat­ur­al pop­u­la­tions, where sexu­al and asexu­al females co-exist, Gib­son and col­leagues were able to demon­strate that a cost of sex does exist, thus under­pin­ning per­haps the most fam­ous conun­drum in evol­u­tion­ary biology.

 

No evidence for maintenance of a sympatric Heliconius species barrier by chromosomal inversions

John Davey, Sarah Barker, Pasi Rastas, Ana Pinharanda, Simon Martin, Richard Durbin, W. Owen McMillan, Richard Merrill, & Chris Jiggins (published 14^th June 2017)

Chosen by Jon Slate

At face value this paper looks like a bit of a null res­ult – the authors find that inver­sions are not respons­ible for gene flow bar­ri­ers between two Hel­ic­oni­us but­ter­fly spe­cies. What is impress­ive about the paper is the amount of rigour and care that has gone into test­ing for inver­sions. Small inver­sions are hard to detect, and so it took abso­lute ‘gold stand­ard’ link­age map­ping and gen­ome assembly to reli­ably test wheth­er or not they were present. The obser­va­tion that inver­sions were not import­ant in this sys­tem makes a nice counter-example to the many recent examples where inver­sions have played an import­ant role in adaptation.

Superior stimulation of female fecundity by subordinate males provides a mechanism for telegony

Sonia Pascoal, Benjamin Jarrett, Emma Evans, & Rebecca Kilner (published 17^th March 2018)

Chosen by Andy Gardner

This is a thought-pro­vok­ing exper­i­ment­al study of fecund­ity stim­u­la­tion in bury­ing beetles. When a female mates with mul­tiple males, her mates may employ vari­ous strategies to increase how many of her off­spring they each get to fath­er. Pas­coal et al found that smal­ler males are par­tic­u­larly adept at stim­u­lat­ing females to pro­duce more off­spring and, because this involves stretch­ing a fixed amount of resources over a more numer­ous brood, the off­spring end up smal­ler as a res­ult. Inter­est­ingly, the effect extends to the off­spring that the female pro­duces with oth­er, lar­ger, males, so that their pro­geny also end up more numer­ous and smal­ler. Accord­ingly, this appears to provide a mech­an­ism for ‘tele­gony’, the Aris­toteli­an idea that indi­vidu­als could inher­it the char­ac­ter­ist­ics of their moth­ers’ mates in addi­tion to their own fathers.

Male‐biased gene expression resolves sexual conflict through the evolution of sex‐specific genetic architecture

Alison Wright, Matteo Fumagalli, Christopher Cooney, Natasha Bloch, Filipe Vieira, Severine  Buechel, Niclas Kolm, & Judith Mank (published 10^th Feb 2018)

Chosen by Steph­en Wright

This study integ­rates pop­u­la­tion gen­om­ic pat­terns with expres­sion data in gup­pies to address the long-stand­ing ques­tion of the extent to which sexu­ally ant­ag­on­ist­ic alleles are main­tained through bal­an­cing selec­tion in nat­ur­al populations.

See also our author inter­view with Alis­on Wright on the Evol­u­tion Let­ters blog.

Egg chemoattractants moderate intraspecific sperm competition

Rowan Lymbery, Jason Kennington, & Jonathan Evans (published 28th Nov 2017)

Chosen by Nic­ola Hemmings

This study revealed how female mech­an­isms can medi­ate the out­come of sperm com­pet­i­tion through select­ive modi­fic­a­tion of sperm func­tion in broad­cast spawn­ing mus­sels. The neat exper­i­ment­al design, which used a fluor­es­cent labelling tech­nique to track the fate of sperm in real-time, showed that chem­ic­als released by eggs are bet­ter at attract­ing sperm from genet­ic­ally com­pat­ible males, res­ult­ing in high­er fer­til­isa­tion suc­cess for “pre­ferred” males. The paper provides new insight into the mech­an­ist­ic basis of sperm-egg inter­ac­tions, and demon­strates the import­ance of genet­ic com­pat­ib­il­ity in dic­tat­ing the out­come of post-cop­u­lat­ory sexu­al selection.

See also our author inter­view with Row­an Lymbery on the Evol­u­tion Let­ters blog.

Unconscious selection drove seed enlargement in vegetable crops

Thomas Kluyver, Glynis Jones, Benoît Pujol, Christopher Bennett, Emily Mockford, Michael Charles, Mark Rees, & Colin Osborne (published 9 May 2017)

Chosen by Anne Char­manti­er

This ori­gin­al manu­script tackles the ques­tion of wheth­er ancient peoples were know­ingly domest­ic­at­ing crops, by invest­ig­at­ing the impact of domest­ic­a­tion on veget­able seed size, which should not be dir­ectly affected by select­ive breed­ing but can evolve over time due to indir­ect effects of nat­ur­al selec­tion act­ing on genet­ic­ally cor­rel­ated char­ac­ters, such as plant size. While this idea seems simple and straight­for­ward, this is the first time that the ques­tion is addressed in this way. The study demon­strates that seed size enlarge­ment in domest­ic­ated spe­cies indeed appears to have occurred not by delib­er­ate breed­ing, but through nat­ur­al selec­tion – either uncon­sciously or as a res­ult of pleiotropy/linkage with genes for oth­er traits.

See also our author inter­view with Colin Osborne on the Evol­u­tion Let­ters blog.

Genetic differences between willow warbler migratory phenotypes are few and cluster in large haplotype blocks

Max Lundberg, Miriam Liedvogel, Keith Larson, Hanna Sigeman, Mats Grahn, Anthony Wright, Susanne Åkesson, & Staffan Bensch (published 16^th June 2017)

Chosen by Jon Slate

Gen­om­ics tools have been prom­ising to unravel the genet­ic secrets of avi­an migra­tion for some time, and this paper really deliv­ers. Wil­low warblers spend sum­mers around the Balt­ic Sea but in winter they migrate to West Africa or to South and East Africa. Here the authors show that the migra­tion route is determ­ined by a genet­ic poly­morph­ism asso­ci­ated with just three regions of the gen­ome. Each region is in an area of low recom­bin­a­tion con­tain­ing at least 50 genes, per­haps indic­at­ive of inver­sion poly­morph­isms. Thus, while only three loci are involved, there may be numer­ous genes with­in each locus act­ing as ‘supergenes’.

 

Environmental variation causes different (co) evolutionary routes to the same adaptive destination across parasite populations

Stuart Auld & June Brand (published 17^th October 2017)

Chosen by Rhonda Snook

The paper tackles a sig­ni­fic­ant evol­u­tion­ary ques­tion – the pre­dict­ab­il­ity of host/parasite (co) evol­u­tion­ary dynam­ics. The authors employed an exper­i­ment­al design that dealt with a com­mon prob­lem in stud­ies of nat­ur­al pop­u­la­tions, of con­found­ing factors that lim­it the abil­ity to answer the ques­tion. The res­ults showed that wheth­er para­sites adap­ted to the com­mon host, as is clas­sic­ally pre­dicted, depended on envir­on­ment­al vari­ation, reveal­ing more com­plex dynam­ics of evol­u­tion­ary tra­ject­or­ies between hosts and parasites.

Strong hybrid male incompatibilities impede the spread of a selfish chromosome between populations of a fly

Rudi Verspoor, Jack Smith, Natasha Mannion, Gregory Hurst, Tom Price (published 10^th May 2018)

Chosen by Steph­en Wright

Why do selfish genet­ic ele­ments show loc­al­ized geo­graph­ic dis­tri­bu­tions when they should be able to spread rap­idly through the land­scape? This study doc­u­ments the nature of a strong effect of genet­ic back­ground on fit­ness that pre­vents the wider spread of a mei­ot­ic drive allele in Dro­so­phila sub­obscura, high­light­ing the poten­tial import­ance of mei­ot­ic drivers in the pro­cess of repro­duct­ive isolation.

Horizontal gene cluster transfer increased hallucinogenic mushroom diversity

Hannah Reynolds, Vinod Vijayakumar, Emile Gluck‐Thaler, Hailee Brynn Korotkin, Patrick Brandon Matheny, Jason Slot (published 27^th Feb 2018)

Chosen by Jon Slate

“Magic” mush­rooms pro­duce the hal­lu­cino­gen psilo­cybin, a trait that has pos­sibly evolved to manip­u­late the beha­viour of sym­bi­ot­ic inver­teb­rates. Sev­er­al phylo­gen­et­ic­ally dis­tinct fungi pro­duce psilo­cybin, and here the authors used gen­ome sequen­cing and assembly to present evid­ence that hori­zont­al gene trans­fer medi­ated the inde­pend­ent evol­u­tion of this trait.

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