Polyploidy has been hypothesized to be both an evolutionary dead-end and a source for
evolutionary innovation and species diversification. Although polyploid organisms …

The origin story and emergence of molecular biology is muddled. The early triumphs in
bacterial genetics and the complexity of animal and plant genomes complicate an intricate …

Understanding how genotypes map onto phenotypes, fitness, and eventually organisms is
arguably the next major missing piece in a fully predictive theory of evolution. We refer to this …

Background Polyploid plants often exhibit enhanced stress tolerance. The underlying
physiological and molecular bases of such mechanisms remain elusive. Here, we …

Microbial communities perform metabolic processes that sustain life on Earth and promote
human health. Microbial consortia sustain these functions in the face of constant structural …

The field of basal cognition seeks to understand how adaptive, context-specific behavior
occurs in non-neural biological systems. Embryogenesis and regeneration require plasticity …

Whole-genome duplication (WGD) is a dramatic, common event in plants. Because of the
detrimental effects arising from doubling the entire chromosome set, such as minority …

The potential role of whole genome duplication (WGD) in evolution is controversial.
Whereas some view WGD mainly as detrimental and an evolutionary 'dead end', there is …

Biological adaptations depend on natural selection sorting out those individuals that exhibit
characters fit to their environment. Selection, in turn, depends on the phenotypic variation …

Understanding general principles about the origin of species remains one of the
foundational challenges in evolutionary biology. The genomic divergence between groups …