Centrality in primate-parasite networks reveals the potential for the transmission of emerging infectious diseases to humans
We thank Randi Griffin, Amy Pedersen, Rosa Menendez, Mark Lineham, and two anonymous reviewers for discussion and comments on a previous draft. This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science (J.M.G. and M.V.), by the Junta de Andalucia (J.M.G.), and by National Science Foundation Grants DEB-0211908 and EF-0723939/0904359 (C.L.N.).
Ovule discounting in an outcrossing, cryptically dioecious tree.
9 páginas, 1 figura, 1 tabla.
Plant facilitation and phylogenetics
The relationship between facilitation and evolutionary ecology is poorly understood. We review five issues elucidating how the phylogenetic relatedness of species provides insight into the role of facilitation in community assembly: (a) Are the facilitative interactions more common between species that differ in a regeneration niche? (b) Are facilitative interactions more common between distantly related species? (c) Do communities governed by facilitation (rather than competition) have higher phylogenetic diversity? (d) As facilitated juvenile plants mature, do they compete with their nurses more often if they are closely related to them? (e) How does the phylogenetic signature in a commun…
Physiological and reproductive differences between hermaphrodites and males in the androdioecious plant Fraxinus ornus
8 páginas, 4 figuras, 1 tabla.
Adaptive trends of sequence compositional complexity over pandemic time in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus
In the brief time since the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic, and despite its proofreading mechanism, the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has accumulated a significant amount of genetic variability through recombination and mutation events. To test evolutionary trends that could inform us on the adaptive process of the virus to its human host, we summarize all this variability in the Sequence Compositional Complexity (SCC), a measure of genome heterogeneity that captures the mutational and recombinational changes accumulated by a nucleotide sequence along time. Despite the brief time elapsed, we detected many differences in the number and length of compositional domains, as well as in their nucleot…
Paternal effects on functional gender account for cryptic dioecy in a perennial plant.
7 páginas, 3 figuras, 1 tabla.
Tracking evolutionary trends towards increasing complexity: a case study in Cyanobacteria
AbstractProgressive evolution, the tendency towards increasing complexity, is a controversial issue in Biology, whose resolution requires a proper measurement of complexity. Genomes are the best entities to address this challenge, as they record the history and information gaining of organisms in their ongoing biotic and environmental interactions. Using six metrics of genome complexity, none of which is primarily associated to biological function, we measure genome complexity in 91 genomes from the phylum Cyanobacteria. Several phylogenetic analyses reveal the existence of progressive evolution towards higher genome complexity: 1) all the metrics detect strong phylogenetic signals; 2) ridg…