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SELFING TO OUTCROSSING. “The conditions for reversal to outcrossing are the opposite of those for the evolution of selfing.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12182/full View in LinkedIn

VIRAL DARK MATTER. "We mined publicly available bacterial and archaeal genomic data sets to identify 12,498 high-confidence viral genomes linked to their microbial hosts. These data augment public data sets 10-fold, provide first viral sequences for 13 new bacterial phyla including ecologically abundant phyla, and help taxonomically identify 7–38% of ‘unknown’ sequence space in viromes." https://elifesciences.org/content/4/e08490 View in LinkedIn

PURGING AND DEPRESSION. “Because elevated homozygosity accompanying the evolution of selfing may effectively purge partially recessive, harmful mutations, inbreeding depression should correspondingly decline in response to increased selfing.” https://lnkd.in/dj9hK7n View in LinkedIn

MULTIPLE PHAGE PARASITES PER HOST. "∼35% of infected cells contained multiple viruses. Here, in the 5492 microbial genomes with detectable viral signal, nearly half (2445) contained more than one detectable virus. Most (∼82%) of these co-infections involved multiple Caudovirales, as previously observed, and likely provides mechanism for viral gene exchange and may be more common in some phages displaying rampant mosaicism." https://elifesciences.org/content/4/e08490 View in LinkedIn

NUMERICAL DISADVANTAGE. “By contrast, outcrossing individuals donate, on average, one copy as a seed parent (pollen for that seed having arrived from an outcrossing event with another individual) and another copy as a pollen parent. Inbreeding depression is usually invoked as the principal counterweight to this advantage.” https://lnkd.in/dj9hK7n View in LinkedIn

GREAT UNKNOWN. "More than 25,000 bacterial and archaeal host genomes are available in NCBI RefSeq (January 2015), whereas only 1,531 of their viruses were entirely sequenced and most (86%) of these derive from only 3 of 61 known host phyla. Thus, although advances in high-throughput sequencing expand the bounds of viral sequence space, these data sets are dominated by uncharacterized sequences (usually 60–95%), termed ‘viral dark matter’." https://elifesciences.org/content/4/e08490 View in LinkedIn

NUMERICAL ADVANTAGE. “Selfing can evolve in response to an extremely diverse array of selective agents, but its intrinsic 3 : 2 transmission advantage is ever present (up to 50%). This specific advantage arises because a selfing individual, in a stable population, transmits a total of three copies of alleles: two through self-fertilized seeds, and a single copy as an outcrossed pollen parent.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12182/full View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this dalliance into the world of biological dark matter. Next weekend we will dip into what we do know about these tiny unknown creatures, and see how important they have been in our evolution and in planetary affairs. But to say that we are still in the Biological Dark Ages is an understatement. We know so little about the real biodiversity of our planet, both big and small. View in LinkedIn

ARTHROPOD VIRAL RESERVOIR. "We similarly documented a remarkable diversity of genome structures in arthropod viruses, including a putative circular form, that sheds new light on the evolution of genome organization. Hence, arthropods are a major reservoir of viral genetic diversity and have likely been central to viral evolution." https://lnkd.in/dhUCtkZ View in LinkedIn

VIRAL POOL. "The huge diversity of negative-sense RNA viruses in insects, spiders and other arthropods suggests that these animals could be central to virus origin and evolution." https://lnkd.in/dYBnxsT View in LinkedIn