Jana M. U'Ren

TL;DR: Findings indicate humans have played an important role in the evolution of anthrax by increasing the proliferation and dispersal of this now global disease.

TL;DR: This study provides a first evaluation of endophytic and endolichenic fungal associations with their hosts at a continental scale and sets the stage for empirical assessments of ecological specificity, metabolic capability, and comparative genomics.

TL;DR: To better understand the domestication process, the coalescent with recombination is used to simulate bottlenecks under various lengths and population sizes and it is found that demography is unlikely to account for the previously observed positive correlation between nucleotide diversity and the population-recombination parameter in maize.

TL;DR: Using whole-genome comparisons of five diverse strains of Bacillus anthracis to facilitate SNP discovery shows that only polymorphisms lying along the evolutionary pathway between reference strains will be observed, and shows how divergent branches in topologies collapse to single points but provide accurate information on internodal distances and points of origin for ancestral clades.

TL;DR: This study reveals the distinctiveness of endolichenic communities relative to those in living and dead plant tissues, with one notable exception: it is found that fungal communities differ at a broad taxonomic level as a function of the phylogenetic placement of their plant or lichen hosts.