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Somerville and John Gibbons, a genomicist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, independently focused on food fermentation, which helped early farmers and herders transform fresh produce and milk into products that can last months or years. Gibbons took a close look at the genome of Aspergillus oryzae, the fungus that jump-starts production of sake from rice and soy sauce and miso from soybeans.

When farmers cultivate A. oryzae, the fungus—a eukaryote, with its DNA enclosed in a nucleus—reproduces on its own. But when humans take a little finished sake and transfer it to a rice mash to begin fermentation anew, they also transfer cells of the fungal strains that evolved and survived best during the first round of fermentation.

Gibbons compared the genomes of scores of A. oryzae strains with those of their wild ancestor, A. flavus. Over time, he found, selection by humans had boosted A. oryzae’s ability to break down starches and to tolerate the alcohol produced by fermentation. “The restructuring of metabolism appears to be a hallmark of domestication in fungi,” he reported last week at Microbe 2022, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. For example, domesticated Aspergillus strains may have up to five times more copies of a gene for metabolizing starches as their ancestor—“a brilliant way for evolution to turn up this enzyme,” Wolfe says.

A simple statistical test shows that contrary to current practice, the “gaps” within DNA protein and sequence alignments commonly used in evolutionary biology can provide important information about nucleotide and amino acid substitutions over time. The finding could be particularly relevant to those studying distantly related species. The work appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Biologists studying evolution do so by looking at how DNA and protein sequences change over time. These changes can be sequence length changes—when specific nucleotides are deleted or added at certain positions—or substitutions, where one nucleotide type is exchanged for a different type at a given point.

“Think of the DNA sequence and its evolution as a sentence being copied by different people over time,” says Jeff Thorne, professor of biological sciences and statistics at NC State and a co-corresponding author of the research. “Over time, a letter in a word will change—that’s a substitution. Leaving out or adding letters or words correspond to deletions or insertions.”

Verse Uni This sometimes comes up: Could the universe have always existed? The problem is, if the universe had existed for an infinite amount of time, everything that could possibly happen must already have happened an infinite number of times — including that … See more.

In cosmology, the steady-state model is an alternative to the Big Bang theory of evolution of the universe. In the steady-state model, the density of matter in the expanding universe remains unchanged due to a continuous creation of matter, thus adhering to the perfect cosmological principle, a principle that asserts that the observable universe is practically the same at any time and any place.

A new study into the neurons found in the earliest-diverging animal lineages reveals key clues about the form of the most ancestral nervous system, and how it first evolved.

Circa 2018

Sequencing and assembly of the 32-Gb genome of the Mexican axolotl reveals that it lacks the developmental gene Pax3, which is essential in other vertebrates; the genome sequence could improve our understanding of the evolution of the axolotl’s remarkable regenerative capabilities.

Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background has been used to probe the distribution of dark matter around some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe.

Investigating the properties of galaxies is fundamental to uncovering the still-unknown nature of the dominant forms of mass and energy in the Universe: dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter resides in “halos” surrounding galaxies, and information on the evolution of this invisible substance can be obtained by examining galaxies over a wide range of cosmic time. But observing distant galaxies—those at high redshifts—poses a challenge for astronomers because these objects look very dim. Fortunately, there is another way to probe the dark matter around such galaxies: via the imprint it leaves on the pattern of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations through gravitational lensing (Fig. 1).

The ongoing monkeypox outbreak is unprecedented. This research could help to explain why.

To understand the architecture of human language, it is critical to examine diverse languages; however, most cognitive neuroscience research has focused on only a handful of primarily Indo-European languages. Here we report an investigation of the fronto-temporo-parietal language network across 45 languages and establish the robustness to cross-linguistic variation of its topography and key functional properties, including left-lateralization, strong functional integration among its brain regions and functional selectivity for language processing. fMRI reveals similar topography, selectivity and inter-connectedness of language brain areas across 45 languages. These properties may allow the language system to handle the shared features of languages, shaped by biological and cultural evolution.