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

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…

Chicken repeat 1 (CR1) retroposons are long interspersed elements (LINEs) that are ubiquitous within amniote genomes and constitute the most abundant family of transposed elements in birds, crocodilians, turtles, and snakes. They are also present in mammalian genomes, where they reside as numerous relics of ancient retroposition events. Yet, despite their relevance for understanding amniote gen…

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…

High levels of genetic diversity exist among natural isolates of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens, and are especially elevated around the replication terminus of the genome, where strain-specific genes are found. In an effort to understand the role of genetic variation in the evolution ofPseudomonas, we analyzed 31,106 base substitutions from 45 mutation accumulation lines of P…

Cactophilic Drosophila species provide a valuable model to study gene–environment interactions and ecological adaptation. Drosophila buzzatii and Drosophila mojavensis are two cactophilic species that belong to the repleta group, but have very different geographical distributions and primary host plants. To investigate the genomic basis of ecological adaptation, we sequenced the genome and de…

Rickettsia felis (Alphaproteobacteria: Rickettsiales) is the causative agent of an emerging flea-borne rickettsiosis with worldwide occurrence. Originally described from the catflea, Ctenocephalides felis,recent reports have identified R. felis from other flea species, as well as other insects and ticks. This diverse host range for R. felis may indicate an underlying gen…

Mammalian and aviangenomes are characterized by asubstantial spatial heterogeneity of GC - content, which is of ten interpretedas reflecting the effect of local GC - biased gene conversion(gBGC), ameiotic repair bias that favors Gand Cover A and T alleles in high recombining genomic regions. Surprisingly, the first fully sequenced nonavian sauropsid (i.e., reptile), the green anole …