The ability to predict the future behavior of an individual cancer is crucial for precision
cancer medicine. The discovery of extensive intratumor heterogeneity and ongoing clonal …

Synonymous mutations are often assumed to be neutral with respect to fitness because they
do not alter the encoded amino acid and so cannot be “seen” by natural selection. Yet a …

Evolvability—the capacity to generate beneficial heritable variation—is a central property of
biological systems. However, its origins and modulation by environmental factors have not …

Plasmids are thought to play a key role in bacterial evolution by acting as vehicles for
horizontal gene transfer, but the role of plasmids as catalysts of gene evolution remains …

The evolution of antibiotic resistance can now be rapidly tracked with high-throughput
technologies for bacterial genotyping and phenotyping. Combined with new approaches to …

Antibiotics are the pivotal pillar of contemporary healthcare and have contributed towards its
advancement over the decades. Antibiotic resistance emerged as a critical warning to public …

A pattern in which nucleotide transitions are favored several fold over transversions is
common in molecular evolution. When this pattern occurs among amino acid replacements …

Understanding epistasis is central to biology. For instance, epistatic interactions determine
the topography of the fitness landscape and affect the dynamics and determinism of …

A better understanding of how antibiotic exposure impacts the evolution of resistance in
bacterial populations is crucial for designing more sustainable treatment strategies. The …

Synonymous mutations do not alter the specified amino acid but may alter the structure or
function of an mRNA in ways that impact fitness. There are few examples in the literature …