W. Kelley Thomas

TL;DR: It is suggested that animal parasitism arose independently at least four times, and plant parasitism three times, which indicates that convergent morphological evolution may be extensive and that present higher-level classification of the Nematoda will need revision.

TL;DR: The Daphnia genome reveals a multitude of genes and shows adaptation through gene family expansions, and the coexpansion of gene families interacting within metabolic pathways suggests that the maintenance of duplicated genes is not random.

TL;DR: The use of complete-genome sequencing in the characterization of spontaneously arising mutations in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae yields numerous unexpected findings, in particular a very high rate of point mutation and skewed distribution of base-substitution types in the mitochondrion and segmental duplication and deletion in the nuclear genome.

TL;DR: This work concludes that the drift-barrier hypothesis is consistent with comparative measures of mutation rates, provides a simple explanation for the existence of error-prone polymerases and yields a formal counter-argument to the view that selection fine-tunes gene-specific mutation rates.

TL;DR: Despite a promising outlook, the field of eukaryotic marker gene surveys faces significant challenges: how to generate data that are most useful to the community, especially in the face of evolving sequencing technologies and bioinformatics pipelines, and how to incorporate an expanding number of target genes.