The March cover of Molecular Biology and Evolution features the work of Leria and Maldonado, who investigated biosilicification and skeletal evolution in sponges.
Follow the link for this month's articles:
đź”— https://academic.oup.com/mbe/issue/43/3
@sishuowang & Meade introduce phyloHessian to enable the use of complex mixture substitution models in molecular dating. Empirical analysis of ancient symbiont lineages leads to a revised understanding of their host association origins.
Fontan et al. show that sequence divergence within introns can disrupt essential gene expression through defective splicing, providing a mechanistic link between rapid Y chromosome evolution and hybrid sterility.
🔄 Tiny, 45 base long RNA can make copies of itself
McInerney proposes that genomes do not encode fixed functions but rather “probability distributions” over functional and phenotypic outcomes, and introduces “genomic perplexity” as a measure of gene-context incompatibility.
đź”— https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag041
Read more on this exciting new perspective on gene function, as James McInerney explains us how it can impact our views on evolutionary theory:
MBE Editors-in-Chief Claudia Russo and Brandon Gaut publish a new editorial on the role of society journals in protecting the scientific record.
đź”— doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag022
🙌 The new logo of Molecular Biology and Evolution is now live!
This new look will carry us forward while maintaining the same rigor and commitment to the molecular evolutionist community as an SMBE journal.
Visit our website to learn why publishing with MBE, as a society-owned journal, helps to support evolutionary science:
đź”— academic.oup.com/mbe/pages/why-publish
🧬 Giant DNA viruses encode their own eukaryote-like translation machinery, researchers discover
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-giant-dna-viruses-encode-eukaryote.html
#virus #microbes #molbio #translation #omics #genomics #giantvirus
In a new study, published in Cell, researchers describe a newfound mechanism for creating proteins in a giant DNA virus, comparable to a mechanism in eukaryotic cells. The finding challenges the dogma that viruses lack protein synthesis machinery, and blurs the line between cellular life and viruses.
Tao et al. sequenced 14 ancient genomes from cave burial sites in Guangxi, revealing continuous gene flow from northern lineages into ancient cave burial populations.
Robbins, Liu & Kelly present RECUR, a method for identifying recurrent amino acid substitutions from multiple sequence alignments that is fast, easy to use, and scalable to thousands of sequences.
Molecular Biology & Evolution
Paul Houle