https://www.mbl.edu/research/research-organisms/rotifer
https://gribblebiolab.org/

More at https://rennisonlab.com/

A new study in Science offers a different and surprisingly sweet perspective. Researchers Jennie Brand-Miller, Karen Hardy, David Raubenheimer, and Les Copeland suggest that sugars from fruits and honey, and later starch from cooked plants, may have been key in helping the human brain evolve.

The brain’s carbohydrate problem

The human brain uses a lot of energy. Even though it is only about 2% of an adult’s body weight, it takes up a large share of the body’s resting energy, mainly using glucose as fuel. Over millions of years, as our ancestors’ brains grew from about 300 grams in Australopithecus afarensis to around 1,500 grams in modern humans, the need for easy-to-access glucose would have gone up a lot.

The researchers, therefore, asked a simple question: where did all that glucose come from?

Their analysis suggests that early hominins may have gotten much of their glucose from naturally sweet foods. Fruit and honey could give them easy access to sugars before they learned to digest cooked starch well. The study’s models show that sugars may have made up a big part of their diet.

From fruit and honey to cooked starch

The story did not end with fruit.

The researchers suggest that humans shifted from eating sweet foods to eating cooked starchy foods. Once people learned to control fire and process food, cooking made starchy plants much easier to digest and turned them into a key source of glucose.

From this perspective, new ways of preparing food, like pounding, processing, and cooking, were not just about making meals softer or tastier. These changes may have given our ancestors access to much more carbohydrate energy.

This gives us a more detailed view of how the human diet evolved. Animal foods were clearly important, but carbohydrates may have been just as important for meeting the high energy needs of a growing brain.

A different way to think about the human diet

The study does not claim that our ancestors ate sugar the way we do today. There is a big difference between eating whole fruits or natural honey and eating the highly processed, refined sugars common now.

Instead, the research points to something bigger. Human evolution may have depended on our ability to find, process, and get energy from many different foods.

Seasonal fruit, honey, underground plant foods, and later cooked starches could have been important sources of glucose. The researchers think that changes in how available these foods were may have shaped how our ancestors searched for food and even affected human evolution.

What does this mean today?

The findings should not be interpreted as a license to eat more refined sugar. Instead, they challenge the simple idea that carbohydrates were less important than meat in human evolution. Our ancestors survived and evolved by exploiting different nutritional opportunities—and by developing technologies that made previously difficult foods more useful.

So perhaps the history of the human brain was not written by meat alone. ISo maybe the story of the human brain is not just about meat. It could also be about fruit, honey, roots, grains, and our unique ability to turn plants into energy. sweeter than we once imagined.

Read more about it at https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.aed8437

Research Directions

Stony corals: evolution of novelty and photosymbiosis

Symbiotic acoels: cell type evolution and photosymbiosis

Animal genomes: structural evolution and gene regulation

https://sgel.biodiv.tw/home

This idea, known as phylogenetic profiling, is the foundation of Profylo (https://github.com/MartinSchoenstein/Profylo), an open-source Python toolkit developed for comparing evolutionary profiles and discovering co-evolving genes. Profylo brings together seven profile-comparison methods and four approaches for identifying co-evolving gene clusters, making it easier to explore hidden functional relationships within genomes.

The study demonstrates that even a simple matrix of gene presence and absence can reveal meaningful biological patterns. By following these evolutionary footprints, researchers can generate new hypotheses about unknown genes, pathways, and molecular interactions. In a world where genomes are being sequenced faster than ever, tools like Profylo offer an exciting way to let evolution itself become a guide to understanding gene function.

More at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00239-025-10280-6 

To understand the evolution of the biodiversity seen on planet earth is one of the major goals in biology. How animals explored new habitats from only being confined to the marine environment and the how the forms diversified is still one of the most tremendous questions to be answered.

http://www.sars.no/research/HejnolGrp.php

https://fhs.mcmaster.ca/gupta-lab/index.html

https://clandonaldusa.org/index.php/tmrca-calculator

Address of the bookmark: https://clandonaldusa.org/index.php/tmrca-calculator

Once a query gene has been entered, it is displayed in its genomic context in parallel to the genomic context of all its orthologous and paralogous copies in all the other sequenced metazoan genomes. Moreover, Genomicus stores and displays the predicted ancestral genome structure in all the ancestral species within the phylogenetic range of interest.

All the data on extant species displayed in this browser are from Ensembl.

Summary statistics of Genomicus version 105.01: (view species tree in pdf or newick)

Address of the bookmark: https://www.genomicus.bio.ens.psl.eu/genomicus-105.01/cgi-bin/search.pl

Key Findings of the Study:

1. Alu Insertion and Tail Loss:
   The researchers discovered an Alu-mediated genetic change in a common ancestor of modern apes and humans. This change disrupted the normal function of a gene involved in tail development, leading to the suppression of tail formation.

2. Gene Disruption Mechanism:
   The Alu insertion was found within a regulatory region of the TBXT gene (also known as T or Brachyury), which is crucial for tail development in vertebrates. This insertion likely altered the gene's expression patterns, leading to tail reduction over evolutionary time.

3. Functional Evidence from Model Organisms:
   To test their hypothesis, the researchers introduced similar genetic modifications in mice. The modified mice exhibited shortened or absent tails, supporting the idea that the identified mutation played a role in tail loss in hominoids.

4. Evolutionary Implications:
   The findings suggest that small, random genomic changes—such as transposable element insertions—can have profound effects on body morphology. This study provides evidence that mobile DNA elements (like Alu) can drive major evolutionary transitions.

5. Relevance to Human Evolution:
   Understanding the genetic basis of tail loss helps in reconstructing the evolutionary history of hominins (the lineage that includes humans and our extinct relatives). It also sheds light on how genetic variations contribute to anatomical diversity among primates.

Significance of the Study:

This research highlights the role of transposable elements in shaping evolutionary traits and provides a concrete genetic explanation for a defining characteristic of humans and great apes. It also demonstrates how mutations in regulatory regions of developmental genes can lead to significant anatomical changes.