evolution

3rd Stanislaw Lem Workshop on Biodiversity and Evolution

The next iteration of our notorious series of Stanislaw Lem Workshops, March 6-9, 2023 at the WasserCluster Lunz, Austria

Project on Movement Ecology extended for a second phase

Our Collaborative Research Centre on 'Magnetoreception and Navigation in Vertebrates' has been extended for a seond phase

The Gossip Paradox: why do bacteria share genes?

Bacteria, in contrast to eukaryotic cells contain two types of genes: chromosomal genes that are fixed to the cell, and plasmids that are mobile genes, easily shared to other cells. The sharing of plasmid genes between individual bacteria and between …

Comparing Optimization Criteria in Antibiotic Allocation Protocols

Clinicians prescribing antibiotics in a hospital context follow one of several possible 'treatment protocols' - heuristic rules designed to balance the immediate needs of patients against the long term threat posed by the evolution of antibiotic …

Emergent Diversity and Persistent Turnover in Evolving Microbial Cross-Feeding Networks

A distinguishing feature of many ecological networks in the microbial realm is the diversity of substrates that could potentially serve as energy sources for microbial consumers. The microorganisms are themselves the agents of compound …

Comment on 'Indirect Fitness Benefits Enable the Spread of Host Genes Promoting Costly Transfer of Beneficial Plasmids'

In their 2016 paper, Dimitriu and colleagues make use of both experimental and analytical techniques to study horizontal gene transfer and the conditions under which indirect fitness effects select for cells with high donor ability. They report both …

First post on my new home page: a musing about the sanity of modern internet technology

My new personal web page is online

Determining selection across heterogeneous landscapes: A perturbation-based method and its application to modeling evolution in space

Spatial structure can decisively influence the way evolutionary processes unfold. To date, several methods have been used to study evolution in spatial systems, including population genetics, quantitative genetics, moment-closure approximations, and …

A new dimension: Evolutionary food web dynamics in two dimensional trait space

Species within a habitat are not uniformly distributed. However this aspect of community structure, which is fundamental to many conservation activities, is neglected in the majority of models of food web assembly. To address this issue, we introduce …

Emergence of evolutionary cycles in size-structured food webs

The interplay of population dynamics and evolution within ecological communities has been of long-standing interest for ecologists and can give rise to evolutionary cycles, e.g. taxon cycles. Evolutionary cycling was intensely studied in small …