Volume 5 Issue 12, December 2021

Far-sighted palaeontologist who guided the Dinosaur Gallery at London’s Natural History Museum, with interests in dinosaurs, early tetrapods and palaeoneurology.

The strength of functional diversity effects on forest productivity increases over time, highlighting the key role of multi-species tree communities in long-term restoration initiatives.

Two analyses of long-read sequencing show that the Winters sex-ratio distorter of Drosophila has been a part of a recent gene family expansion, coupled to the appearance of suppressors, in a genomic arms race driven by satellite DNA.

The authors report a fossilized vertebrate rib with spiked dermal armour fused to its dorsal surface from the mid-Jurassic of Morocco, which they interpret as the earliest known ankylosaur.

The authors measure numerous ecosystem functions across an elevational gradient on Mt Kilimanjaro and find that species richness impacts function more than species turnover across sites. They also show that variation in species richness impacts ecosystem functioning more strongly at the landscape scale than at the local scale.

In a long-running forest biodiversity experiment in China, the authors ask which measures of tree functional trait diversity impact productivity as forests develop. While productivity increased with community-weighted mean trait values early on, after 7 years productivity was significantly increased in plots with higher functional diversity.

Some Drosophila species have cryptic sex-ratio drive systems. Here, the authors show rapid expansion of a driver gene family, Distorter on the X, in three closely related Drosophila species on the X chromosome and suppressors on the autosomes.

The Dox meiotic drive system distorts the sex ratio in Drosophila simulans. Here, the authors reconstruct the stepwise emergence, and recent amplification of Dox superfamily genes in parallel with the emergence of autosomal hairpin RNA-class siRNA loci that target subsets of these putative drivers.

Horizontal gene transfer could stabilize cooperation in bacteria because plasmids could promote the transfer of genes encoding public goods. However, the authors use comparative analysis and theoretical modelling to show that, while horizontal gene transfer may help cooperative genes invade a population initially, they have less of a role in long-term maintenance of cooperation.