Repression of tick microRNA-133 induces organic anion transporting polypeptide expression critical for Anaplasma phagocytophilum survival in the vector and transmission to the vertebrate host

Setter, Mousset and colleagues present an analytically-tractable model for the effects of adaptive introgression on non-adaptive genetic variation in the genomic region surrounding the beneficial allele. The result is a characteristic volcano-shaped pattern of increased variability that arises around the positively-selected site, and the authors introduce an open-source method VolcanoFinder to detect this signal in genomic data. 

Touchon et al analyse non-clinical isolates of Escherichia coli to assess the mechanisms of gene repertoire diversification in light of isolation sources and phylogeny. The authors show that gene repertoires evolve so rapidly by high turnover of mobile genetic elements that epidemiologically indistinguishable strains can be phenotypically heterogeneous.

Neural crest (NC) cells are pluripotent embryonic stem cells that originate from neural tissue during early embryogenesis and contribute to development of the eye. Here, Takamiya et al find that two waves of NC cell populations with different properties contribute to distinct parts of the eye.