The May issue of MBE is here, featuring the work of Topaloudis et al., who evaluated genotype imputation accuracy in a large barn owl low-coverage WGS dataset.

🔗 https://academic.oup.com/mbe/issue/43/5

📷 Alex Labhardt

#evobio #molbio

Berruga-Fernández et al. show that bacterial hybrid chromosome formation driven by conjugative mobile genetic elements may be an important and widespread mechanism in the emergence and evolution of high-risk bacterial pathogens.

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag085

#evobio #molbio #bacteria

Ceriotti et al. investigate the rewiring of organellar translation in the holoparasitic Balanophoraceae, revealing extreme changes in the anciently conserved machinery of plant organellar translation.

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag077

📷 Tuber and two inflorescences of the holoparasitic plant Lophophytum pyramidale collected from Parque Nacional Calilegua, Argentina

#evobio #molbio

Pinto et al. present SCINKD as a framework to identify unannotated sex chromosomes and curate diploid genome assemblies from a single individual.

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag067

#evobio #molbio #compbio

Cui et al. investigate the evolutionary trajectory leading to dim-light vision in vertebrates, concluding that it evolved via three main stages of molecular adaptation, at the origins of ancestral rhodopsin pigments.

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag096

#evobio #molbio #opsin

Cochetel & Cantu publish a new MBE Review on plant pangenomes, outlining major paradigms from gene-based catalogs to haplotype-resolved graphs, core and variable compartments, and how graph-based frameworks enable analyses that are difficult with single linear references.

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag087

#evobio #molbio #pangenome

[molbio] PCR is a (Surprisingly) Near-Optimal Technology
https://nikomc.com/2026/04/22/pcr/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47866215

#MolecularBiology #molbio #PCR #MolecularGenetics #BiologicalEngineering

MBE's April issue Highlight features the article by Ewan Harney and Josefa González on transgenerational inheritance of heat shock responses in fruit flies, written by SMBE Fellow Shady Kuster.

"A gift from a great-grand-fly—transgenerational epigenetic inheritance of heat shock response"

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag083

#evobio #molbio #epigenetics

Didelot et al. present the R package DiagnoDating for diagnosing issues in a reconstructed dated phylogeny, including outlier detection, posterior predictive checking and residual analysis.

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag093

#evobio #molbio #compbio #phylogeny

Bazzicalupo et al analyzed introgression in Iberian and Eurasian lynx with the application of a deep convolutional neural network, detecting specific regions of the genome with signals of gene flow in three populations of these species.

🖌️Paula Martin Art

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag086

#evobio #molbio #introgression