Lots of new papers out from the group!

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The first quarter of the year has seen another 6 papers come out from the group.

Two new ones in print this week are: 

Ilse's paper on the eye movements of stomatopods and their different levels of independence depending on the visual task (and a front cover too! Wonderful photo by Mike Bok)

Daly, I.M., How, M.J., Partridge, J.C., and Roberts, N.W.  2017 The independence of eye movements in a stomatopod crustacean is task dependent. Journal of Experimental Biology 220: 1360-1368; doi: 10.1242/jeb.153692

And Dan's new paper on how plant viruses affect the polarization of light reflected from leaves. 

Maxwell, D.J., Partridge, J.C., Roberts, N.W., Boonham, N. and Foster, G.D. 2017 The effects of surface structure mutations in Arabidopsis thaliana on the polarization of reflections from virus-infected leaves. PLoS ONE 12(3): e0174014. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0174014

See the publication page for full details

 

New paper on the evolution of visual pigments in the deep sea

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Understanding the link between how proteins function in animals that live in extreme environments and selection on specific properties of amino acids has proved extremely challenging. Here we present the discovery of how the compressibility of opsin proteins in two evolutionarily distinct animal groups, teleosts and cephalopods, appears to be adapted to the high-pressure environment of the deep-sea. We report how in both groups, opsins in deeper living species are calculated to be less compressible. This is largely due to a common set of amino acid sites (bovRH# 159, 196, 213, 275) undergoing positive destabilizing selection in six of the twelve amino acid physiochemical properties that determine protein compressibility. This suggests a common evolutionary mechanism to reduce the adiabatic compressibility of opsin proteins. Intriguingly, the sites under selection are on the proteins’ outer faces at locations known to be involved in opsin-opsin dimer interactions.

The full paper can be found http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2016.08.007