Evolutionary applications research highlight for issue 1

Evolutionary applications research highlight for issue 1

As we highlight each month in this section, the application of evolutionary theory to issues affecting the health and well-being of human, agricultural, and natural populations is gaining increasing momentum. In a recent review article written for Science, Scott Carroll et al. take on the now monumental task of synthesizing the many ways that evolutionary biology can be used to address global c...

Evolutionary Applications research highlights for issue 9: the ever-evolving field of agriculture

The earliest application of evolutionary theory, although unknowingly at the time, was artificial selection of crops and animals for food production. Ever increasing technical advances in breeding, genetic engineering and comparative genomics have since led to a rapid acceleration in the rate of such selection, although many of the basic principles underlying the process have remained the same ...

Research Highlight

Research highlight for issue 8: disease evolution and ecology across space

How infectious disease spreads both from individual to individual and across a landscape will depend upon many inter-related factors, including the genetic composition of host and pathogen populations, the pathogen transmission rate, host density, population connectivity, and the evolutionary response of both host and pathogen over time. As such, the study of infectious disease straddles a numb...

Research highlights for issue 2: recent applications in molecular evolution

The study of changing sequence composition of DNA, RNA and proteins over time has offered some of the most fundamental insights into the evolutionary process to date. From understanding how populations and ultimately species diverge to the study of how particular selection pressures affect changes in genotype and phenotype, our knowledge of evolution would be a fraction of what it is now withou...