Aarti Venkat

TL;DR: With the recent revolution in sequencing, the unresolved question of what influences the range and values of genetic diversity across taxa is revisited.

TL;DR: Overall, gene repertoires suggest that the route to advanced eusociality in bees was mediated by many small changes in many genes and processes, and not by notable expansion or depauperation.

TL;DR: There is no single road map to eusociality; independent evolutionary transitions in sociality have independent genetic underpinnings and these transitions do have similar general features, including an increase in constrained protein evolution accompanied by increases in the potential for gene regulation and decreases in diversity and abundance of transposable elements.

TL;DR: A fine-scale genetic map of the Western chimpanzee is constructed from high-throughput sequence data and shows that chimpanzee recombination is dominated by hotspots, which show no overlap with those of humans even though rates are similarly elevated around CpG islands and decreased within genes.

TL;DR: These results demonstrate that convergent evolution can involve a mosaic pattern of molecular changes in both shared and lineage-specific sets of genes, and provide a starting point for linking specific genetic changes to the evolution of eusociality.