Female assortative mate choice functionally validates synthesized male odours of evolving stickleback river-lake ecotypes.

During mate choice decisions, females of many vertebrates use male olfactory cues to achieve immunogenetic optimality of their offspring. Three-spined sticklebacks ( Gasterosteus aculeatus) populating habitats that differ in their parasite communities evolve locally adapted combinations of genetic variants encoded at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). Such adaptation confers optimal resistance to the local parasite fauna.

Analysis of intestinal microbiota in hybrid house mice reveals evolutionary divergence in a vertebrate hologenome.

Recent evidence suggests that natural selection operating on hosts to maintain their microbiome contributes to the emergence of new species, that is, the 'hologenomic basis of speciation'. Here we analyse the gut microbiota of two house mice subspecies, Mus musculus musculus and M. m.

Origins of multicellular evolvability in snowflake yeast.

Complex life has arisen through a series of 'major transitions' in which collectives of formerly autonomous individuals evolve into a single, integrated organism. A key step in this process is the origin of higher-level evolvability, but little is known about how higher-level entities originate and gain the capacity to evolve as an individual. Here we report a single mutation that not only creates a new level of biological organization, but also potentiates higher-level evolvability.

Genome-wide mapping of gene-microbiota interactions in susceptibility to autoimmune skin blistering.

Susceptibility to chronic inflammatory diseases is determined by immunogenetic and environmental risk factors. Resident microbial communities often differ between healthy and diseased states, but whether these differences are of primary aetiological importance or secondary to the altered inflammatory environment remains largely unknown. Here we provide evidence for host gene-microbiota interactions contributing to disease risk in a mouse model of epidermolysis bullosa acquisita, an autoantibody-induced inflammatory skin disease.