The evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria threatens to become the leading cause of worldwide
mortality. This crisis has renewed interest in the practice of phage therapy. Yet, bacteria’…

Evolutionary innovations are often achieved by repurposing existing genes to perform new
functions; however, the mechanisms enabling the transition from old to new remain …

The relative contributions of adaptive selection and neutral drift to genetic change are unknown
but likely depend on the inherent abundance of functional genotypes in sequence space …

Viral gain-of-function mutations frequently evolve during laboratory experiments. Whether
the specific mutations that evolve in the lab also evolve in nature and whether they have the …

Next-generation DNA sequencing technology was used to score >100 000 mutations resulting
from exposure of a nucleic acid template to a mutagenic dNTP analog during a single …

Support for undergraduate laboratory education based on a CURE (Course-based Undergraduate
Research Experience) model is more widespread than ever. By giving students the …

An important driver of evolution in viruses is natural selection to optimize the use of their hosts’
genetic network. To learn how viruses respond to this pressure, we disrupted the genetic …

In the 154 years since Darwin proposed a mechanism for evolution by natural selection 1,
advances in theory and molecular biology have revealed that evolutionary outcomes can be …

Viral gain-of-function mutations are commonly observed in the laboratory; however, it is
unknown whether those mutations also evolve in nature. We identify two key residues in the host …

The necroptosis cell death pathway has been implicated in host defense and in the pathology
of inflammatory diseases. While phosphorylation of the necroptotic effector pseudokinase …