The provision of food has been a central preoccupation of policy-makers throughout history. Today we are witnessing a period of food security pessimism triggered by increases in food prices, and their higher volatility, that began in 2008. However, previous episodes of food pessimism were ended by the Industrial and Green Revolutions, and policy-makers legitimately ask whether human ingenuity a…

This paper describes the ways in which changing consumption patterns and production technologies have altered the boundaries between agriculture and food. Increasing income and urbanization have driven a steady increase in the demand for prepared and processed foods, reducing the need for in-home preparation. But this well-documented transition has in turn led to a shift in the structure of the…

We provide a brief introduction to the Oxford Review of Economic Policy�s issue on Food, which is concerned with the contemporary transformation of the global food and agriculture system

Overlapping genes, where one DNA sequence codes for two proteins with different reading frames, are not uncommon in viruses and cellular organisms. Estimating the direction and strength of natural selection acting on overlapping genes is important for understanding their functionality, origin , evolution, maintenance, and potential interaction. However, the standard methods for estimating synon…

Inheritable epigenetic mutations (epimutations) can contribute to transmittable phenotypic variation. Thus, epimutations can be subject to natural selection and impact the fitness and evolution of organisms. Based on the framework of the modified Tajima’s Dtest for DNA mutations, we developed a neutrality test with the statistic “Dm” to detect selection force son DNA methylati…

Recombination plays an important role in the divergence of bacteria, but the frequency of inter species and intraspecies recombination events remains poorly understood. We investigated recombination events that occurred within core genomes of 35 Vibrio strains (family Vibrionaceae, Gammaproteobacteria), from six closely related species in the so-called “Harveyi clade.” The strains were sele…

Pseudomonas sp. M1 is able to mineralize several unusual substrates of natural and xenobioticorigin, contributing to its competence to thrive indifferent ecological niches. In this work,the genome of M1 strain was resequenced by Illumina Mi Seqtore fine the quality of a published draft by resolving the majority of repeat-rich regions. In silico genome analysis led to the prediction of met…

Genome-wide scans for signals of natural selection in human populations have identified a large number of candidate loci that underlie local adaptations. This is surprising given the relatively short evolutionary time since the divergence of the human population. One hypothesis that has not been formally examined is whether and how the recent human evolution may have been shaped by cosele…

Mitochondrial (mt) genomes are intensively studied in Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, but they are poorly documented in basal fungal lineages. In this study, we sequenced the completemt DNA of Rhizophagus sp.DAOM213198, a close relative to Rhizophagus irregularis, a widespread, ecologically and economical relevant species belonging to Glomeromycota. Unlike all other known taxonomically close rela…

The bacterium Pseudomonasae ruginosa is a significant cause of acute nosocomial infections as well as chronic respiratory infections inpatients with cystic fibrosis (CF). Recent reports of the intercontinentals pread of a CF-specific epidemics train, combined with high intrinsic levels of antibiotic resistance, have made this opportunistic pathogen an important public health c…