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BEAK LENGTH GENES. “The scientists suspected these genes could be linked to beak length, so they measured this anatomical feature in U.K. great tits. They found birds with that handful of favored genes, as expected, tended to have longer beaks than their continental counterparts in the Netherlands.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

MINORITY BACTERIAL HORIZONTAL TRANSFERS. “Yet such results are not inconsistent with horizontal gene transfer having a dominant impact on the evolution of prokaryotic genomes in the long term. Transfers occurring prior to the diversification of a group such as the enterobacteria can only be detected in larger phylogenetic reconstructions.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

HOMOLOGOUS GENES. “They then labeled around 30 of the genes that seemed to oust all the others and scanned the scientific literature to figure out what role these genes played in other organisms. It turns out many of them are involved in human skull development and bill length in Darwin’s finches—Galápagos Islands birds that served as the famed biologist’s most famous subjects.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

SHIFTING GENE PROFILES. “Favored genes had nudged their way into these areas and, with time, pushed out most other genes that might have been found there—a clear indication natural selection was at work, according to the researchers.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

REGIONAL GENETIC VARIATION. “They first embarked on an ambitious investigation into the genomes—the complete sets of genes—of 2,322 great tits from across the U.K. and the Netherlands. They flagged spots in the genomes between the two populations that were most different, which turned out to be the same spots that were the least different among the genomes of individual U.K. birds.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

REGIONAL PHENOTYPIC VARIATION. “Biologists have long known U.K. great tits had longer beaks than those in continental Europe, but the reason for this difference was unclear. Now a group of Dutch and British researchers tracked the variation down to the birds’ genes and found natural selection at work.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

GENETIC BASIS. “We found that genomic regions under differential selection contained candidate genes for bill morphology and used genetic architecture analyses to confirm that these genes, especially the collagen gene COL4A5, explained variation in bill length. COL4A5 variation was associated with reproductive success, which, combined with spatiotemporal patterns of bill length, suggested ongoing selection for longer bills in the United Kingdom. Last, bill length and COL4A5 variation were associated with usage of feeders, suggesting that longer bills may have evolved in the United Kingdom as a response to supplementary feeding.” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6361/365 View in LinkedIn

RAPID ADAPTATION. “U.K. birds not only have longer bills, but these longer bills are associated with increased fitness. These changes likely reflect an increase in domestic garden bird feeders over the past several decades.” https://lnkd.in/g97gtqk View in LinkedIn

GEOLOGICAL VERSUS CONTEMPORANEOUS. “Ecologically significant evolutionary change, occurring over tens of generations or fewer, is now widely documented in nature. These findings counter the long-standing assumption that ecological and evolutionary processes occur on different time-scales.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

GALÁPAGOS FINCHES. “A human influence on beak-size evolution is not new, we have seen signs of this in finches on an inhabited island (Santa Cruz) of the Galápagos, but an association with bird feeders is new.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn