An article published online at the Nature web site on November 24 (Chou et al., 2014) presents a fascinating study of examples in which bacterial genes have found their way to a number of distinct eukaryotic lineages including ticks and mites, gastropod (e.g.,...
Over the past several weeks the health news has been dominated by the outbreak of infections by Ebola virus (EBOV) in several West African nations: Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria. A study (Gire et al., 2014) published online at the end of August and now...
Geneticists and evolutionary biologists have for decades embraced the view, no doubt reinforced by terminology such as “silent” (i.e., synonymous) mutations, that for protein-encoding genes, genotype determines phenotype through control of the amino acid...