The study of experimental evolution in Escherichia coli has provided unprecedented insights into the mechanisms of adaptive mutations, elucidating how populations diverge and optimise their fitness ...

A team of scientists from the United States recently investigated the mutational signatures in the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) ...

An unprecedented amount of genomic sequence data is accumulating in real-time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 1.2 million sequences of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) ...

Scientists report adaptive divergence in cryptic color pattern is underlain by two distinct, complex chromosomal rearrangements, where millions of bases of DNA were flipped backwards and moved from ...

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For a long time, evolutionary biologists have thought that the genetic mutations that drive the evolution of genes and proteins are largely neutral: they're neither good nor bad, but just ordinary ...

New imaging reveals a built-in safeguard that allows B cell populations to rapidly expand in germinal centers without introducing deleterious mutations. Germinal centers are high-speed evolution ...

For more than half a century, many biologists have leaned on the neutral theory of molecular evolution to explain how DNA and proteins change over time. The idea grew from early work in the 1960s, ...

To apply a neutral model of evolution to a population, Hahn explained, you don’t have to know how strong selection is, how large the population is, whether mutations are dominant or recessive, or ...