MIVEGEC (UMR CNRS/IRD/UM1) 5290 Montpellier Cedex 5, France ; CREEC Montpellier Cedex 5, France.
Published: January 2013
AI Article Synopsis
Article Abstract
Since the mid 1970s, cancer has been described as a process of Darwinian evolution, with somatic cellular selection and evolution being the fundamental processes leading to malignancy and its many manifestations (neoangiogenesis, evasion of the immune system, metastasis, and resistance to therapies). Historically, little attention has been placed on applications of evolutionary biology to understanding and controlling neoplastic progression and to prevent therapeutic failures. This is now beginning to change, and there is a growing international interest in the interface between cancer and evolutionary biology. The objective of this introduction is first to describe the basic ideas and concepts linking evolutionary biology to cancer. We then present four major fronts where the evolutionary perspective is most developed, namely laboratory and clinical models, mathematical models, databases, and techniques and assays. Finally, we discuss several of the most promising challenges and future prospects in this interdisciplinary research direction in the war against cancer.
Homologous recombination is a key evolutionary force that varies considerably across bacterial species. However, how the landscape of homologous recombination varies across genes and within individual genomes has only been studied in a few species. Here, we used Approximate Bayesian Computation to estimate the recombination rate along the genomes of 145 bacterial species.
AbstractTheoretical studies from diverse areas of population biology have shown that demographic stochasticity can substantially impact evolutionary dynamics in finite populations, including scenarios where traits that are disfavored by natural selection can nevertheless increase in frequency through the course of evolution. Here, we analytically describe the eco-evolutionary dynamics of finite populations from demographic first principles. We investigate how noise-induced effects can alter the evolutionary fate of populations in which total population size may vary stochastically over time.
Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), a specialized mode of photosynthetic carbon assimilation characterized by nocturnal fixation of atmospheric CO and vacuolar malic acid storage, is found in a wide variety of vascular plant species, mainly those inhabiting water-limited environments. Identifying and characterizing diverse CAM species enhances our understanding of the physiological, ecological, and evolutionary significance of CAM photosynthesis. In this study, we examined the effect of CO elimination on chlorophyll fluorescence-based photosynthetic parameters in two constitutive CAM Kalanchoe species and six orchids.
Larvae from the petroleum oil fly, Helaeomyia petrolei, live in the asphaltene and polyaromatic hydrocarbon rich asphalt seeps of Rancho La Brea, Los Angeles, California. These larvae pass high amounts of viscous asphalt through their digestive system, and their gut microbiota is exposed to these extreme conditions. Environmental stress response mechanisms can co-select for antibiotic resistance, and in the current study we used 16S rRNA and genomic sequencing along with the Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database (CARD) tools to characterize antibiotic resistance profiles from six bacteria previously isolated from the oil fly larval intestinal tract, linking phenotypic and genotypic resistance profiles.
Biochemical and evolutionary interactions between mitochondrial and nuclear genomes ('mitonuclear interactions') are proposed to underpin fundamental aspects of biology including evolution of sexual reproduction, adaptation and speciation. We investigated the role of pre-mating isolation in maintaining functional mitonuclear interactions in wild populations bearing diverged, putatively co-adapted mitonuclear genotypes. Two lineages of eastern yellow robin Eopsaltria australis-putatively climate-adapted to 'inland' and 'coastal' climates-differ by ~7% of mitogenome nucleotides, whereas nuclear genome differences are concentrated into a sex-linked region enriched with mitochondrial functions.
