Symbiotic associations with bacterial partners have facilitated important evolutionary transitions in the life histories of eukaryotes. For instance, many insects have established long-term interactions with intracellular bacteria that provide them with essential nutrients lacking in their diet. However, despite the high level of interdependency among organisms involved in endosymbiotic systems, examples of symbiont replacements along the evolutionary history of insect hosts are numerous. In their paper, Husnik and McCutcheon [1] test the stability of symbiotic systems in a particularly imbricated Russian-doll type interaction, where one bacterium lives insides another bacterium, which itself lives inside insect cells. For their study, they chose representative species of mealybugs (Pseudococcidae), a species rich group of sap-feeding insects that hosts diverse and complex symbiotic systems. In species of the subfamily Pseudococcinae, data published so far suggest that the primary symbiont, a ß-proteobacterium named Tremblaya princeps, is supplemented by a second bacterial symbiont (a ϒ-proteobaterium) that lives within its cytoplasm; both participate to the metabolic pathways that provide essential amino acids and vitamins to their hosts. Here, Husnik and McCutcheon generate host and endosymbiont genome data for five phylogenetically divergent species of Pseudococcinae in order to better understand: 1) the evolutionary history of the symbiotic associations; 2) the metabolic roles of each partner, 3) the timing and origin of Horizontal Gene Transfers (HGT) between the hosts and their symbionts.
Their results show that all species harbour the primary and at least one secondary symbiont, whose intra-bacterial localization was verified using fluorescence in situ hybridization. In one species (Pseudococcus longispinus), Tremblaya even hosts two intracellular bacteria each with a large genome (even though it is not entirely clear whether these two symbionts are indeed found within Tremblaya). The obligate presence of an intra-bacterial symbiont is best explained by the loss in Tremblaya princeps of critical genes for translation that require “intracellular complementation”.
The most striking result concerns the identity of the intra-bacterial symbiont: genome sizes and structures of the “secondary” (intra-Tremblaya) symbionts vary drastically according to the host species. Phylogenetic analyses based on 80 conserved proteins, place all these ϒ-proteoacteria (except one of the P. longispinus symbionts) in a Sodalis allied clade. However, their relationships do not mirror the one of their hosts, and some of them show signs of very recent acquisition. Altogether these results provide strong evidence for several independent acquisitions of these highly intra-bacterial integrated symbionts. Scenarios for the history of the symbiosis are clearly laid out and discussed by the authors, and the scenario involving several independent replacements of a the intra-Tremblaya symbiont by diverse Sodalis-like bacteria appears the most likely given the data presented here. Selected biosynthetic functions are then mapped onto the host and symbiont genomes, showing the high level of interdependency of the partners for the synthesis of essential amino acids and vitamin. These maps also identify genes in the host genome that might have been acquired through HGT from bacteria and show that many of them are shared by all mealybug species sequenced so far. HGT events have thus predated the acquisitions of the current “intra-Tremblaya“ symbionts and have probably been acquired from previous symbiont infections.
Overall, this is a thorough study, using a diverse set of data and meticulous analyses that present convincing evidence that replacements of symbionts occurred repeatedly even in an imbricated symbiotic system. The phylogenetic analyses inferring the timing of HGTs also depict a highly dynamic history of gene losses and retentions in both host and symbiont genomes. Altogether these results demonstrate how the chimeric nature of individuals allows shuffling at different levels of organisation: organisms like symbionts can be replaced, genes can be exchanged among the partners of the chimera. The surprise is that constraints arising from interdependencies do not impede these exchanges. In the discussion, the authors present a very interesting parallel with the evolution of organelles: if the story presented here mirrors the one of mitochondria, it supports a gradualist view where mitochondria arrived late in the evolution of eukaryotic cells that already contained many bacterial genes resulting from HGT from previous symbionts.

Reference

[1] Husnik F., McCutcheon JP. 2016. Repeated replacements of an intrabacterial symbiont in the tripartite nested mealybug symbiosis. PNAS 113: E5416-E5424. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1603910113

It is easy to define phenotypic plasticity as a mechanism by which traits change in response to a modification of the environment. Many complex mechanisms are nevertheless involved with plastic responses, their strength, and stability (e.g., reliability of cues, type of exposure, genetic expression, epigenetics). It is rather intuitive to think that environmental cues perceived at different stages of development will logically drive different phenotypic responses (Fawcett and Frankenhuis 2015). However, it has proven challenging to try and explain, or model how and why different effects are caused by similar cues experienced at different developmental or life stages (Walasek et al. 2022). The impact of these ‘sensitive windows’ on the stability of plastic responses within or across generations remains unclear. In their paper entitled “Sensitive windows for within- and trans-generational plasticity of anti-predator defences”, Tariel-Adam (2023) address this question.

In this paper, Tariel et al. acknowledge the current state of the art, i.e., that some traits influenced by the environment at early life stages become fixed later in life (Snell-Rood et al. 2015) and that sensitive windows are therefore more likely to be observed during early stages of development. Constructive exchanges with the reviewers illustrated that Tariel et al. presented a clear picture of the knowledge on sensitive windows from a conceptual and a mechanistic perspective, thereby providing their study with a strong and elegant rationale. Tariel et al. outlined that little is known about the significance of this scenario when it comes to transgenerational plasticity. Theory predicts that exposure late in the life of parents should be more likely to drive transgenerational plasticity because the cue perceived by parents is more likely to be reliable if time between parental exposure and offspring expression is short (McNamara et al. 2016). I would argue that although sensible, this scenario is likely oversimplifying the complexity of evolutionary, ecological, and inheritance mechanisms at play (Danchin et al. 2018). Tariel-Adam et al. (2023) point out in their paper how the absence of experimental results limits our understanding of the evolutionary and adaptive significance of transgenerational plasticity and decided to address this broad question.

Tariel-Adam et al. (2023) used the context of predator-prey interactions, which is a powerful framework to evaluate the temporality of predator cues and prey responses within and across generations (Sentis et al. 2018). They conducted a very elegant experiment whereby two generations of freshwater snails Physa acuta were exposed to crayfish predator cues at different developmental windows. They triggered the within-generation phenotypic plastic response of inducible defences (e.g., shell thickness) and identified sensitive windows as to evaluate their role in within-generation phenotypic plasticity versus transgenerational plasticity. They used different linear models, which lead to constructive exchanges with reviewers, and between reviewers, well trained on these approaches, in particular on effect sizes, that improved the paper by pushing the discussion all the way towards a consensus. 

Tariel-Adam et al. (2023) results showed that the phenotypic plastic response of different traits was associated with different sensitive windows. Although early-life development was confirmed to be a sensitive window, it was far from being the only developmental stage driving within-generation plastic responses of defence traits. This finding contributes to change our views on plasticity because where theoretical models predict early- and late-life sensitive windows, empirical results gathered here present a more continuous opportunity for sensitive windows over the lifetime of freshwater snails. This is likely because multifactorial mechanisms drive the reliability and adaptive significance of predator cues. To me, this paper most original contribution lies probably in the empirical investigation of sensitive windows underlying transgenerational plasticity. Their finding implies mechanistic ties between sensitive windows driving within-generation and transgenerational plasticity for some traits, but they also shed light on the possible independence of these processes. Although one may be disheartened by these findings illustrating the ability of nature to combine complex mechanisms in order to produce somewhat unpredictable scenarios, one can only find that this unlimited range of phenotypic plasticity scenarios is a wonder to investigate because much remains to be understood. As mentioned in the conclusion of the paper, the opportunity for sensitive windows to drive such a range of plastic responses may also be an opportunity for organisms to adapt to a wide range of environmental demands. 

References

Danchin E, A Pocheville, O Rey, B Pujol, and S Blanchet (2019). Epigenetically facilitated mutational assimilation: epigenetics as a hub within the inclusive evolutionary synthesis. Biological Reviews, 94: 259-282. https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12453

Fawcett TW, and WE Frankenhuis (2015). Adaptive Explanations for Sensitive Windows in Development. Frontiers in Zoology 12, S3. https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-9994-12-S1-S3 

McNamara JM, SRX Dall, P Hammerstein, and O Leimar (2016). Detection vs. Selection: Integration of Genetic, Epigenetic and Environmental Cues in Fluctuating Environments. Ecology Letters 19, 1267–1276. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12663

Sentis A, R Bertram, N Dardenne, et al. (2018). Evolution without standing genetic variation: change in transgenerational plastic response under persistent predation pressure. Heredity 121, 266–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-018-0108-8 

Snell-Rood EC, EM Swanson, and RL Young (2015). Life History as a Constraint on Plasticity: Developmental Timing Is Correlated with Phenotypic Variation in Birds. Heredity 115, 379–388. https://doi.org/10.1038/hdy.2015.47

Tariel-Adam J, E Luquet, and S Plénet (2023). Sensitive windows for within- and trans-generational plasticity of anti-predator defences. OSF preprints, ver. 4 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/mr8hu

Walasek N, WE Frankenhuis, and K Panchanathan (2022). An Evolutionary Model of Sensitive Periods When the Reliability of Cues Varies across Ontogeny. Behavioral Ecology 33, 101–114. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arab113

The preprint by Pratlong et al. [1] is a well thought quest for genomic regions involved in local adaptation to depth in a species a red coral living the Mediterranean Sea. It first describes a pattern of structuration and then attempts to find candidate genes involved in local adaptation by contrasting deep with shallow populations. Although the pattern of structuration is clear and meaningful, the candidate genomic regions involved in local adaptation remain to be confirmed. Two external reviewers and myself found this preprint particularly interesting regarding the right-mindedness of the authors in front of the difficulties they encounter during their experiments. The discussions on the pros and cons of the approach are very sound and can be easily exported to a large number of studies that hunt for local adaptation. In this sense, the lessons one can learn by reading this well documented manuscript are certainly valuable for a wide range of evolutionary biologists.
More precisely, the authors RAD-sequenced 6 pairs of 'shallow vs deep' samples located in 3 geographical sea areas (Banyuls, Corsica and Marseilles). They were hoping to detect genes involved in the adaptation to depth, if there were any. They start by assessing the patterns of structuration of the 6 samples using PCA and AMOVA [2] and also applied the STRUCTURE [3] assignment software. They show clearly that the samples were mostly differentiated between geographical areas and that only 1 out the 3 areas shows a pattern of isolation by depth (i.e. Marseille). They nevertheless went on and scanned for variants that are highly differentiated in the deep samples when compared to the shallow paired samples in Marseilles, using an Fst outliers approach [4] implemented in the BayeScEnv software [5]. No clear functional signal was in the end detected among the highly differentiated SNPs, leaving a list of candidates begging for complementary data.
The scan for local adaptation using signatures of highly divergent regions is a classical problem of population genetics. It has been applied on many species with various degrees of success. This study is a beautiful example of a well-designed study that did not give full satisfactory answers. Readers will especially appreciate the honesty and the in-depth discussions of the authors while exposing their results and their conclusions step by step.

References

[1] Pratlong, M., Haguenauer, A., Brener, K., Mitta, G., Toulza, E., Garrabou, J., Bensoussan, N., Pontarotti P., & Aurelle, D. (2018). Separate the wheat from the chaff: genomic scan for local adaptation in the red coral Corallium rubrum. bioRxiv, 306456, ver. 3 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Evol Biol. doi: 10.1101/306456
[2] Excoffier, L., Smouse, P. E. & Quattro, J. M. (1992). Analysis of molecular variance inferred from metric distances among DNA haplotypes: application to human mitochondrial DNA restriction data. Genetics, 131(2), 479-491.
[3] Pritchard, J. K., Stephens, M., & Donnelly, P. (2000). Inference of population structure using multilocus genotype data. Genetics, 155(2), 945-959.
[4] Lewontin, R. C., & Krakauer, J. (1973). Distribution of gene frequency as a test of the theory of the selective neutrality of polymorphisms. Genetics, 74(1), 175-195.
[5] de Villemereuil, P., & Gaggiotti, O. E. (2015). A new FST‐based method to uncover local adaptation using environmental variables. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 6(11), 1248-1258. doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.12418

Exciting times are afoot for those of us interested in the ecology and evolution of invasive populations. Recent years have seen evolutionary process woven firmly into our understanding of invasions (Miller et al. 2020). This integration has inspired a welter of empirical and theoretical work. We have moved from field observations and verbal models to replicate experiments and sophisticated mathematical models. Progress has been rapid, and we have seen science at its best; an intimate discussion between theory and data.
An area currently under very active development is our understanding of pushed invasions. Here a population spreads through space driven, not by dispersal and growth originating at the leading tip of the invasion, but by dispersal and growth originating deeper in the bulk of the population. These pushed invasions may be quite common – they result when per capita growth and dispersal rates are higher in the bulk of the wave than at the leading tip. They result from a range of well-known phenomena, including Allee effects and density-dependent dispersal (Gandhi et al. 2016; Bîrzu et al. 2019). Pushed invasions travel faster than we would expect given growth and dispersal rates on the leading tip, and they lose genetic diversity more slowly than classical pulled invasions (Roques et al. 2012; Haond et al. 2018; Bîrzu et al. 2019).
Well… in theory, anyway. The theory on pushed waves has momentarily streaked ahead of the empirical work, because empirical systems for studying pushed invasions are rare (though see Gandhi et al. 2016; Gandhi, Korolev, and Gore 2019). In this paper, Dahirel and colleagues (2020) make the argument that we may be able to generate pushed invasions in laboratory systems simply by reducing the connectedness of our experimental landscapes. If true, we might have a simple tool for turning many of our established experimental systems into systems for studying pushed dynamics.
It’s a nice idea, and the paper goes to careful lengths to explore the possibility in their lab system (a parasitoid wasp, Trichogramma). They run experiments on replicate wasp populations comparing strongly- v poorly-connected arrays, and estimate the resulting invasion speeds and rate of diversity loss. They also build a simulation model of the system, allowing them to explore in-silico a range of possible processes underlying their results.
As well as developing these parallel systems, Dahirel and colleagues (2020) go to careful lengths to develop statistical analyses that allow inference on key parameters, and they apply these analyses to both the experimental and simulation data. They have been motivated to apply methods that might be used in both laboratory and field settings to help classify invasions.
Ultimately, they found reasonable evidence that their poorly-connected habitat did induce a pushed dynamic. Their poorly connected invasions travelled faster than they should have if they were pulled, they lost diversity more slowly than the highly connected habitat, and replicates with a higher carrying capacity tended to have higher invasion speeds. All in line with expectations of a pushed dynamic. Interestingly, however, their simulation results suggest that they probably got this perfect result for unexpected reasons. The strong hint is that their poorly-connected habitat induced density dependent dispersal in the wasps. Without this effect, their simulations suggest they should have seen diversity decreasing much more rapidly than it did.
There is a nuanced, thoughtful, and carefully argued discussion about all this in the paper, and it is worth reading. There is much of value in this paper. Theirs is not a perfect empirical system in which all the model assumptions are met and in which huge population sizes make stochastic effects negligible. Here is a system one step closer to the messy reality of biology. The struggle to align this system with new theory has been worth the effort. Not only does it give us hope that we might usefully be able to discriminate between classes of invasions using real-world data, but it hints at a rule that Tolstoy might have expressed this way: all pulled invasions are alike, each pushed invasion is pushed in its own way.

References

Bîrzu, G., Matin, S., Hallatschek, O., and Korolev, K. S. (2019). Genetic drift in range expansions is very sensitive to density dependence in dispersal and growth. Ecology Letters, 22(11), 1817-1827. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13364
Dahirel, M., Bertin, A., Haond, M., Blin, A., Lombaert, E., Calcagno, V., Fellous, S., Mailleret, L., Malausa, T., and Vercken, E. (2020). Shifts from pulled to pushed range expansions caused by reduction of landscape connectivity. bioRxiv, 2020.05.13.092775, ver. 4 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Evolutionary Biology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.13.092775
Gandhi, S. R., Korolev, K. S., and Gore, J. (2019). Cooperation mitigates diversity loss in a spatially expanding microbial population. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(47), 23582-23587. doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910075116
Gandhi, S. R., Yurtsev, E. A., Korolev, K. S., and Gore, J. (2016). Range expansions transition from pulled to pushed waves as growth becomes more cooperative in an experimental microbial population. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(25), 6922-6927. doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1521056113
Haond, M., Morel-Journel, T., Lombaert, E., Vercken, E., Mailleret, L. and Roques, L. (2018). When higher carrying capacities lead to faster propagation (2018), bioRxiv, 307322, ver. 4 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1101/307322
Miller et al. (2020). Eco‐evolutionary dynamics of range expansion. Ecology, 101(10), e03139. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3139
Roques, L., Garnier, J., Hamel, F., and Klein, E. K. (2012). Allee effect promotes diversity in traveling waves of colonization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(23), 8828-8833. doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201695109

Modelling the evolution of complete genome sequences in populations requires accounting for the recombination process, as a single tree can no longer describe the underlying genealogy. The sequentially Markov coalescent (SMC, McVean and Cardin 2005; Marjoram and Wall 2006) approximates the standard coalescent with recombination process and permits estimating population genetic parameters (e.g., population sizes, recombination rates) using population genomic datasets. As such datasets become available for an increasing number of species, more fine-tuned models are needed to encompass the diversity of life cycles of organisms beyond the model species on which most methods have been benchmarked.

The work by Korfmann et al. (Korfmann et al. 2024) represents a significant step forward as it accounts for multiple mergers in SMC models. Multiple merger models account for simultaneous coalescence events so that more than two lineages find a common ancestor in a given generation. This feature is not allowed in standard coalescent models and may result from selection or skewed offspring distributions, conditions likely met by a broad range of species, particularly microbial.

Yet, this work goes beyond extending the SMC, as it introduces several methodological innovations. The "classical" SMC-based inference approaches rely on hidden Markov models to compute the likelihood of the data while efficiently integrating over the possible ancestral recombination graphs (ARG). Following other recent works (e.g. Gattepaille et al. 2016), Korfmann et al. propose to separate the ARG inference from model parameter estimation under maximum likelihood (ML). They introduce a procedure where the ARG is first reconstructed from the data and then taken as input in the model fitting step. While this approach does not permit accounting for the uncertainty in the ARG reconstruction (which is typically large), it potentially allows for the extraction of more information from the ARG, such as the occurrence of multiple merging events. Going away from maximum likelihood inference, the authors trained a graph neural network (GNN) on simulated ARGs, introducing a new, flexible way to estimate population genomic parameters.

The authors used simulations under a beta-coalescent model with diverse demographic scenarios and showed that the ML and GNN approaches introduced can reliably recover the simulated parameter values. They further show that when the true ARG is given as input, the GNN outperforms the ML approach, demonstrating its promising power as ARG reconstruction methods improve. In particular, they showed that trained GNNs can disentangle the effects of selective sweeps and skewed offspring distributions while inferring past population size changes.

This work paves the way for new, exciting applications, though many questions must be answered. How frequent are multiple mergers? As the authors showed that these events "erase" the record of past demographic events, how many genomes are needed to conduct reliable inference, and can the methods computationally cope with the resulting (potentially large) amounts of required data? This is particularly intriguing as micro-organisms, prone to strong selection and skewed offspring distributions, also tend to carry smaller genomes.

References

Gattepaille L, Günther T, Jakobsson M. 2016. Inferring Past Effective Population Size from Distributions of Coalescent Times. Genetics 204:1191-1206.
https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.115.185058
 
Korfmann K, Sellinger T, Freund F, Fumagalli M, Tellier A. 2024. Simultaneous Inference of Past Demography and Selection from the Ancestral Recombination Graph under the Beta Coalescent. bioRxiv, 2022.09.28.508873. ver. 5 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.28.508873
 
Marjoram P, Wall JD. 2006. Fast "coalescent" simulation. BMC Genet. 7:16.
https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2156-7-16
 
McVean GAT, Cardin NJ. 2005. Approximating the coalescent with recombination. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci. 360:1387-1393.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2005.1673