Sexual selection, one of the central pillars of evolutionary theory, has powerful effects on organismal morphology, behavior, and population dynamics. However, current knowledge about geographical variation in this evolutionary mechanism and its underlying drivers remains highly incomplete, in part because standardized data on the strength of sexual selection is sparse even for well-studied organisms. Barber et al. use information on mating systems—including the incidence of polygamy and extra-pair paternity—to estimate the intensity of sexual selection in the world’s birds. Overall, their analyses suggest that climatic conditions leading to short, intense breeding seasons, or highly abundant and patchy food resources, increase the potential for polygamy in birds, driving latitudinal gradients in sexual selection. By presenting selection scores and associated uncertainty for 10,671 (>99.9%) bird species, Barber et al. provide a global template for future research on the causes and consequences of sexual selection, also highlighting gaps in knowledge. For example, further research is required to understand the mating systems of many tropical bird species – including the black-bellied sunbird (Cinnyris nectarinioides) pictured here.
Image Credit: Joseph Tobias
Essay
How do mammals convert dynamic odor information into neural maps for landscape navigation?
PLOS Biology: published November 21, 2024 | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002908
Consensus View
Reconstructing the last common ancestor of all eukaryotes
PLOS Biology: published November 25, 2024 | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002917
Perspectives
Queer- and trans-inclusive faculty hiring—A call for change
PLOS Biology: published November 22, 2024 | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002919
A call for research to address the threat of paper mills
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Harnessing plant biosynthesis for the development of next-generation therapeutics
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Mining biology for antibiotic discovery
PLOS Biology: published November 26, 2024 | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002946
Primers
Social learning is triggered by environmental cues in immigrant birds
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CD74 promotes the formation of an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment in triple-negative breast cancer in mice by inducing the expansion of tolerogenic dendritic cells and regulatory B cells
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Mitochondrial calcium uptake orchestrates vertebrate pigmentation via transcriptional regulation of keratin filaments
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Reconstructed influenza A/H3N2 infection histories reveal variation in incidence and antibody dynamics over the life course
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A cytoplasmic form of EHMT1N methylates viral proteins to enable inclusion body maturation and efficient viral replication
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Rho1 and Rgf1 establish a new actin-dependent signal to determine growth poles in yeast independently of microtubules and the Tea1–Tea4 complex
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Quorum sensing in Vibrio controls carbon metabolism to optimize growth in changing environmental conditions
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Systematic characterization of plant-associated bacteria that can degrade indole-3-acetic acid
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Niche-specific metabolic phenotypes can be used to identify antimicrobial targets in pathogens
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Deep mutational scanning of H5 hemagglutinin to inform influenza virus surveillance
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Short Reports
Immigrant birds learn from socially observed differences in payoffs when their environment changes
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Evolutionarily conserved brainstem architecture enables gravity-guided vertical navigation
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Methods and Resources
Community-based reconstruction and simulation of a full-scale model of the rat hippocampus CA1 region
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Stochastic models allow improved inference of microbiome interactions from time series data
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MosAIC: An annotated collection of mosquito-associated bacteria with high-quality genome assemblies
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Biofilm dispersal patterns revealed using far-red fluorogenic probes
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Meta-Research Article
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Discovery Report
Humans and great apes visually track event roles in similar ways
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