Preprints
There are 1975 Preprints listed.
Evolutionary Pathways and Trajectories in Antibiotic Resistance
Published: 2021-01-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Pathogenic Microbiology
Evolution is the hallmark of life. Descriptions of the evolution of microorganisms have provided a wealth of information, but knowledge regarding “what happened” has precluded a deeper understanding of “how” evolution has proceeded, as in the case of antimicrobial resistance. The difficulty in answering the “how” question lies in the multihierarchical dimensions of evolutionary processes, nested [...]
Set theory and types of groups in phylogenetics
Published: 2021-01-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Mathematically, it is possible to be a subset (⊂) of a set and not to be its member (∈)—e.g. the empty set. Here, I highlight that a similar principle applies to undiscovered objects in sets of real objects. The current definitions of holophyly (monophyly sensu stricto) and paraphyly suggest a direct membership (∈) of ancestors in taxa. These ancestors are almost always unknown (undiscovered) in [...]
Multi-replicated enrichment communities as a model system in microbial ecology
Published: 2021-01-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Recent advances in robotics and affordable genomic sequencing technologies have made it possible to establish and quantitatively track the assembly of enrichment communities in high-throughput. By conducting community assembly experiments in up to thousands of synthetic habitats, where the extrinsic sources of variation among replicates can be controlled, we can now study the reproducibility and [...]
Consistent replacement of small- by large-ranged plant species across habitats
Published: 2021-01-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The direction and magnitude of long-term changes in local plant species richness are highly variable among studies, while species turnover is ubiquitous. However, it is unknown whether the nature of species turnover is idiosyncratic or whether certain types of species are consistently gained or lost across different habitats. To address this question, we analyzed the trajectories of 1,827 [...]
Complex environments alter competitive dynamics in fungi
Published: 2021-01-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Competition is a key biotic factor that often structures natural communities. Many attempts to disentangle how competition shapes natural communities have relied on experiments on simplified systems or through simple mathematical models. But these simplified approaches are limited in their ability to represent the complexity seen in more natural settings. Here, we considered the competitive [...]
Raczka et al. Interactions between microbial diversity and substrate chemistry determine the fate of carbon in soil.
Published: 2021-01-19
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Microbial decomposition drives the transformation of plant-derived substrates into microbial products that form stable soil organic matter (SOM). Recent theories have posited that decomposition depends on an interaction between SOM chemistry with microbial diversity and resulting function. Here, we explicitly test these theories by coupling quantitative stable isotope probing and metabolomics to [...]
Humans as the world’s greatest eco-evolutionary force
Published: 2021-01-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Humans are dominant global drivers of ecological and evolutionary change, rearranging ecosystems and natural selection in many ways. Here, we show increasing evidence that human activity also plays a disproportionate role in shaping the eco-evolutionary potential of systems. We suggest the net outcome of human influences on trait change, ecology, and the feedbacks that link them, will often (but [...]
The Three Ts of Pathogen Evolution During Zoonotic Emergence
Published: 2021-01-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences
There is increasing interest in the role that evolution may play in current and future pandemics, but there is often also considerable confusion about the actual evolutionary predictions. This may be, in part, due to a historical separation of evolutionary and medical fields, but there is a large, somewhat nuanced body of evidence-supported theory on the evolution of infectious disease. In this [...]
Liberating host-virus knowledge from biological dark data
Published: 2021-01-15
Subjects: Diseases, Epidemiology, International Public Health, Medicine and Health Sciences, Organisms, Public Health
Connecting basic data about bats and other potential hosts of SARS-CoV-2 with their ecological context is critical for understanding the emergence and spread of COVID-19. However, when global lockdown started in March 2020, the world’s bat experts were locked out of their research laboratories, which, in turn, locked up large volumes of offline ecological and taxonomic data. Pandemic lockdowns [...]
Assembly processes lead to divergent soil fungal communities within and among twelve forest ecosystems along a latitudinal gradient
Published: 2021-01-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
- Latitudinal gradients provide opportunities to better understand soil fungal community assembly and its relationship with vegetation, climate, soil and ecosystem function. Understanding the mechanisms underlying community assembly is essential for predicting compositional responses to changing environments. - We quantified the relative importance of stochastic and deterministic processes in [...]
Hardwood content impacts the parasitoid community associated with Eastern spruce budworm (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae)
Published: 2021-01-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
A major pest of eastern North American forests is spruce budworm, Choristoneura fumiferana Clemens (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae), which outbreaks every 30–40 years and causes large scale tree mortality. Researchers have established that hardwood content reduces the defoliation and mortality of balsam fir and spruces during spruce budworm outbreaks. One mechanism posited to explain these patterns is [...]
Early-life seasonal, weather and social effects on telomere length in a wild mammal
Published: 2021-01-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Early-life environmental conditions can provide a source of individual variation in life-history strategies and senescence patterns. Conditions experienced in early life can be quantified by measuring telomere length, which can act as a biomarker of survival probability. Here, we investigate whether seasonal changes, weather conditions, and group size are associated with early-life and/or [...]
Condition-transfer maternal effects modulate sexual conflict
Published: 2021-01-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Strong sexual selection frequently favours males that increase their reproductive success by harming females, with potentially negative consequences for population growth. Understanding what factors modulate conflict between the sexes is hence critical to understand both the evolution of male and female phenotypes and the viability of populations in the wild. Here, we model the evolution of male [...]
Re-understanding evolution: the Information Continuum Model
Published: 2021-01-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Evolution is contingent on inherited information shaped by natural selection. Few biologists familiar with evolution would object to this description. This apparent consensus could be taken to indicate agreement on the forces shaping evolution, but vivid discussions reveal profound divergences on how evolution is perceived. The predominant paradigm of the Modern Synthesis (MS) holds the position [...]
Mate-guarding duration is mainly influenced by the risk of sperm competition and not by female quality in a golden orb-weaver spider
Published: 2021-01-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Males are expected to mate with as many females as possible, but can maximize their reproductive success through strategic mating decisions. For instance, males can increase their own fitness by mating with high quality females that produce more offspring. Additionally, males can adjust mating effort based on the relative distribution of females and male competitors. To test factors that [...]