Predatory fireflies and their toxic firefly prey have evolved distinct toxin resistance strategies.

Toxic cardiotonic steroids (CTSs) act as a defense mechanism in many firefly species (Lampyridae) by inhibiting a crucial enzyme called Na,K-ATPase (NKA). Although most fireflies produce these toxins internally, species of the genus Photuris acquire them from a surprising source: predation on other fireflies. The contrasting physiology of toxin exposure and sequestration between Photuris and other firefly genera suggests that distinct strategies may be required to prevent self-intoxication.

Predatory fireflies and their toxic firefly prey have evolved distinct toxin resistance strategies.

Toxic cardiotonic steroids (CTS) act as a defense mechanism in many firefly species (Lampyridae) by inhibiting a crucial enzyme called Na,K-ATPase (NKA). While most fireflies produce these toxins internally, species of the genus acquire them from a surprising source: predation on other fireflies. The contrasting physiology of toxin exposure and sequestration between and other firefly genera suggests that distinct strategies may be required to prevent self-intoxication.

Diverse environmental perturbations reveal the evolution and context-dependency of genetic effects on gene expression levels.

There is increasing appreciation that, in addition to being shaped by an individual's genotype and environment, most complex traits are also determined by poorly understood interactions between these two factors. So-called "genotype × environment" (G×E) interactions remain difficult to map at the organismal level but can be uncovered using molecular phenotypes. To do so at large scale, we used TM3'seq to profile transcriptomes across 12 cellular environments in 544 immortalized B cell lines from the 1000 Genomes Project.

Socioeconomic status effects on health vary between rural and urban Turkana.

Background And Objectives: Understanding the social determinants of health is a major goal in evolutionary biology and human health research. Low socioeconomic status (often operationalized as absolute material wealth) is consistently associated with chronic stress, poor health and premature death in high-income countries. However, the degree to which wealth gradients in health are universal-or are instead made even steeper under contemporary, post-industrial conditions-remains poorly understood.

Ancestral polymorphisms shape the adaptive radiation of across the Hawaiian Islands.

Some of the most spectacular adaptive radiations begin with founder populations on remote islands. How genetically limited founder populations give rise to the striking phenotypic and ecological diversity characteristic of adaptive radiations is a paradox of evolutionary biology. We conducted an evolutionary genomics analysis of genus , a landscape-dominant, incipient adaptive radiation of woody plants that spans a striking range of phenotypes and environments across the Hawaiian Islands.

Population genetics of the coral : Toward genomic prediction of bleaching.

Although reef-building corals are declining worldwide, responses to bleaching vary within and across species and are partly heritable. Toward predicting bleaching response from genomic data, we generated a chromosome-scale genome assembly for the coral We obtained whole-genome sequences for 237 phenotyped samples collected at 12 reefs along the Great Barrier Reef, among which we inferred little population structure. Scanning the genome for evidence of local adaptation, we detected signatures of long-term balancing selection in the heat-shock co-chaperone We conducted a genome-wide association study of visual bleaching score for 213 samples, incorporating the polygenic score derived from it into a predictive model for bleaching in the wild.

Adaptive substitutions underlying cardiac glycoside insensitivity in insects exhibit epistasis in vivo.

Predicting how species will respond to selection pressures requires understanding the factors that constrain their evolution. We use genome engineering of to investigate constraints on the repeated evolution of unrelated herbivorous insects to toxic cardiac glycosides, which primarily occurs via a small subset of possible functionally-relevant substitutions to Na,K-ATPase. Surprisingly, we find that frequently observed adaptive substitutions at two sites, 111 and 122, are lethal when homozygous and adult heterozygotes exhibit dominant neural dysfunction.