Pamela S Soltis

Aug 1, 2024 | nature.com | Heather R. Kates |Brian O’Meara |Gregory W Stull |Euan James |Qin Tian |Ting-Shuang Yi | +5 more

Correction to: Nature Communications https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48036-3, published online 27 May 2024In this article the funding from the ‘National Science Foundation of China (No. 31720103903)’ was omitted. The original article has been corrected.

Jun 18, 2024 | sfgate.com | Pamela S Soltis

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)Pamela Soltis, University of Florida; Joseph Cook, University of New Mexico, and Richard Yanagihara, University of Hawaii(THE CONVERSATION) In less than 20 years, communities around the globe have been hit by a string of major disease outbreaks: SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika and now, COVID-19.

May 27, 2024 | nature.com | Heather R. Kates |Brian O’Meara |Gregory W Stull |Euan James |Qin Tian |Ting-Shuang Yi | +5 more

AbstractRoot nodule symbiosis (RNS) is a complex trait that enables plants to access atmospheric nitrogen converted into usable forms through a mutualistic relationship with soil bacteria. Pinpointing the evolutionary origins of RNS is critical for understanding its genetic basis, but building this evolutionary context is complicated by data limitations and the intermittent presence of RNS in a single clade of ca. 30,000 species of flowering plants, i.e., the nitrogen-fixing clade (NFC).

Jun 2, 2023 | southdadenewsleader.com | Akito Y. Kawahara |Pamela S Soltis

About 100 million years ago, a group of trendsetting moths started flying during the day rather than at night, taking advantage of nectar-rich flowers that had co-evolved with bees. This single event led to the evolution of all butterflies. Scientists have known the precise timing of this event since 2019, when a large-scale analysis of DNA discounted the reigning hypothesis that pressure from bats prompted the evolution of butterflies after the extinction of dinosaurs.

May 15, 2023 | nature.com | Akito Y. Kawahara |David Plotkin |Fabien L. Condamine |Mariana P. Braga |Paul Frandsen |Hannah L. Owens | +34 more

AbstractButterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events. However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking.