17 July 2023

 

If you’re here for the weekly paper picks, I’ve got some cool ones this week too :D

 

Antigenic strain diversity predicts different biogeographic patterns of invasion and maintenance of anti-malarial drug resistance. This paper tackles one of the major questions my epidemiology research was originally concerned with: why malaria parasites evolve resistance to drugs more easily in low-transmission settings. I’d say I was scooped, but I kind of drifted into other questions after half answering it in my first evolution paper, so good on these folks for addressing the matter carefully. The main innovation here that I hadn’t considered in earlier work is showing that immunity plays an important role by providing an evolutionary pressure that pushes population genetic change along in high transmission, high genetic diversity settings, even when the pressures of immunity and drug selection are on different loci.

If anyone’s interested, I’ll probably journal club this next week with colleagues in Colombia and Germany. Happy to share the link.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.06.531320v2

 

Clustering predicted structures at the scale of the known protein universe. These people classified proteins (in ridiculous amounts) according to structure. The cool thing to note here is that they find archaeal and bacterial homologues for some human immune proteins. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.09.531927v1

 

Evolution of Evolvability In Rapidly Adapting Populations. This theoretical paper provides a nice analytical exploration of the ability to evolve as an evolvable trait. A lot to think about here and I definitely want to read and process more carefully. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.12.548717v1

 

Conceptual and empirical bridges between micro- and macroevolution. Another piece I really have to digest. This perspective seems like a nice overview of questions some high-level questions in ecology and evolution at the moment, and how we might tacke them. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02116-7.epdf?sharing_token=FP12sH8L8zU13RkBtSH29NRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0Pe3qXWvsJRZIRpdUF8bHd88NDuk8ABsFwlYYYzuLc_q7Yr5xgAqzEipBCHWDwNkeN9i1G5SljFa63KM9zvAQyrnIDdxp3vgtNLIYRZa3LBsmeVsVtF7tmpXXi4ghVQ5gA%3D

Sequential intrahost evolution and onward transmission of SARS-CoV-2 variants.They caught variant emergence in the act, neat. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38867-x

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