By Jason Stajich, on February 17th, 2008
What delineates species boundaries in fungi? Much work has been done on biological and phylogenetic species concepts in fungi. Some concepts are reviewed in Taylor et al 2006 and in Taylor et al 2000, and applications can be seen in several pathogens such as Paraccocidiodies, Coccidioides, and the model filamentous (non-pathogenic) fungus
By Jason Stajich, on February 5th, 2008
Dettman, Anderson, and Kohn recently published a paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology on reproductive experimental evolution in two Neurospora crassa populations evolved under different selective conditions. This is a great study that complements work published last year in Nature on experimental evolution in Saccharomyces cerevisiae populations. Neurospora populations were evolved under high salt and low temperature and were started from either high diversity (interspecific crosses, N. crassa vs N. intermedia) or low diversity (intraspecific cross, two N. crassa isolates D143 (Louisiana, USA)and D69 (Ivory Coast)) as described in Figure 1. The experimentally evolved populations were then tested for asexual and sexual fitness (they were taken through complete meiotic cycle throughout the experiment to avoid insure there was selection on the sexual reproduction pathway.
By sharpton, on March 30th, 2007
Perhaps not a surprise to anyone that has dabbled in evolutionary analysis of proteins, Kawahara and Imanishi (BMC Evolutionary Biology 2007) confirm that not every protein evolves via a molecular clock in Saccharomyces
sensu scricto. Using everyone’s favorite evolutionary tool, PAML, the authors identify protein lineages via a whole genome scan that evolve relatively slow [...]
By Jason Stajich, on February 23rd, 2007
A paper in PLoS Genetics studied what happens when individual chromosomes of S. cerevisiae are replaced with a homologous copy its sister species, S. paradoxus. Previous work from Ken Wolfe’s lab interpreted the differential loss of genes after the whole genome duplication in the Saccharomyces lineage played a role in speciation among the yeast [...]
