Inheritance of somatic mutations by animal offspring.

Since 1892, it has been widely assumed that somatic mutations are evolutionarily irrelevant in animals because they cannot be inherited by offspring. However, some nonbilaterians segregate the soma and germline late in development or never, leaving the evolutionary fate of their somatic mutations unknown. By investigating uni- and biparental reproduction in the coral (Cnidaria, Anthozoa), we found that uniparental, meiotic offspring harbored 50% of the 268 somatic mutations present in their parent.

The impact of estimator choice: Disagreement in clustering solutions across K estimators for Bayesian analysis of population genetic structure across a wide range of empirical data sets.

The software program STRUCTURE is one of the most cited tools for determining population structure. To infer the optimal number of clusters from STRUCTURE output, the ΔK method is often applied. However, a recent study relying on simulated microsatellite data suggested that this method has a downward bias in its estimation of K and is sensitive to uneven sampling.

Nanoscale dynamics of cellulose digestion by the cellobiohydrolase TrCel7A.

Understanding the mechanism by which cellulases from bacteria, fungi, and protozoans catalyze the digestion of lignocellulose is important for developing cost-effective strategies for bioethanol production. Cel7A from the fungus Trichoderma reesei is a model exoglucanase that degrades cellulose strands from their reducing ends by processively cleaving individual cellobiose units. Despite being one of the most studied cellulases, the binding and hydrolysis mechanisms of Cel7A are still debated.