Understanding the origins of novel complex traits, the evolutionary transitions they enabled, and how those shaped the subsequent course of evolution, are all foundational objectives of evolutionary biology. Yet how developmental systems may transform to yield the first eye, limb, or placenta remains poorly understood. Seminal work by Courtney Clark-Hachtel, David Linz, and Yoshinori Tomoyasu published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 used the origins of insect wings - one of the most impactful innovations of animal life on Earth - to provide both a case study and a new way of thinking of how novel complex traits may come into being. This paradigm-setting study not only transformed the way we view insect wings, their origins, and their affinities to other morphological structures; even more importantly, it created entryways to envision innovation as emerging gradually, not somehow divorced from ancestral homology, but through it via the differential modification, fusion, and elaboration of ancestral component parts. In a conceptual universe of descent with modification, where everything new must ultimately emerge from the old, this work thereby established a powerful bridge connecting ancestral homology and novelty through a gradual process of innovation, sparking much creative and groundbreaking work to follow since its publication just a little over a decade ago.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2024.09.004 | DOI Listing |
J Am Med Inform Assoc
January 2025
Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore, 117602, Singapore.
Objectives: This study introduces Smart Imitator (SI), a 2-phase reinforcement learning (RL) solution enhancing personalized treatment policies in healthcare, addressing challenges from imperfect clinician data and complex environments.
Materials And Methods: Smart Imitator's first phase uses adversarial cooperative imitation learning with a novel sample selection schema to categorize clinician policies from optimal to nonoptimal. The second phase creates a parameterized reward function to guide the learning of superior treatment policies through RL.
PLoS Pathog
January 2025
Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, United States of America.
Host-pathogen interactions represent a dynamic evolutionary process, wherein both hosts and pathogens continuously develop complex mechanisms to outmaneuver each other. Borrelia burgdorferi, the Lyme disease pathogen, has evolved an intricate antigenic variation mechanism to evade the host immune response, enabling its dissemination, persistence, and pathogenicity. Despite the discovery of this mechanism over two decades ago, the precise processes, genetic elements, and proteins involved in this system remain largely unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
January 2025
Foot and Mouth Disease Department, National Veterinary Research Institute, Vom, Plateau State, Nigeria.
The global public health risk posed by Salmonella Kentucky (S. Kentucky) is rising, particularly due to the dissemination of antimicrobial resistance genes in human and animal populations. This serovar, widespread in Africa, has emerged as a notable cause of non-typhoidal gastroenteritis in humans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
January 2025
College of Business, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China.
In credit risk assessment, unsupervised classification techniques can be introduced to reduce human resource expenses and expedite decision-making. Despite the efficacy of unsupervised learning methods in handling unlabeled datasets, their performance remains limited owing to challenges such as imbalanced data, local optima, and parameter adjustment complexities. Thus, this paper introduces a novel hybrid unsupervised classification method, named the two-stage hybrid system with spectral clustering and semi-supervised support vector machine (TSC-SVM), which effectively addresses the unsupervised imbalance problem in credit risk assessment by targeting global optimal solutions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Med Chem
January 2025
Sorbonne Université, CNRS Institut Parisien de Chimie Moléculaire, IPCM, F-75005 Paris, France.
Despite recent advances in cancer treatment, there is still a need for novel compounds with antineoplastic activity. Among 11 biphenyl-based organogold(III) -heterocyclic carbene (NHC) (BGC) complexes of general formula [(C^C)Au(NHC-pyr)X], where (C^C) = 4,4'-ditertbutylbiphenyl, X = Cl or phenylacetylide, and (NHC-pyr) is a pyridyl-substituted NHC ligand, the complex bearing a 4-CF-pyridyl substituent and a chloride ligand showed promising antineoplastic activity on the triple negative breast cancer cell line. was able to induce cell apoptosis but had no effect on the cell cycle.
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