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#Fungi are critical biological #carbon storage reservoirs in soil, but what about marine ecosystems? This study by Juan Carlos Trejos-Espeleta, William Orsi &co shows that marine fungi store carbon in arctic fjord sediment, although #climate warming brings rapid change🧪#AcademicSky plos.io/4eeXaDP

Crossover formation ensures accurate division of homologous #chromosome pairs during #meiosis. This study by Hongtao Zhang, Ye Hong &co shows that the ubiquitin-proteasome system orchestrates pro-crossover protein dynamics, restricting the number of crossovers 🧪#AcademicSky plos.io/4eeUYfz

How has #evolution shaped Transcription Elongation Factors, important for #GeneExpression? This study by Alex Francette, Karen Arndt &co traces ten core factors to the last eukaryotic common ancestor, and shows they display both conserved and lineage-specific domains. 🧪#AcademicSky plos.io/4eaCUTJ

#Aging drives changes in the #brain and #metabolism, but how independent are these effects? This study by @asafarahani.bsky.social, @misicbata.bsky.social &co identifies two axes of brain-body associations, each primarily related to age or metabolic health. 🧪#AcademicSky plos.io/4eoIu3L

by Alex M. Francette, Aakash Grover, Nathan Clark, Karen M. Arndt In eukaryotes, transcription elongation factors (TEFs) associate with RNA Polymerase II (RNAPII) to facilitate gene expression and couple transcription to co-transcriptional processes, including chromatin regulation and RNA processing. To further our understanding of TEF biology, we developed a domain-centric analysis pipeline to perform a broad survey of 10 TEF orthologs—Paf1, Ctr9, Cdc73, Rtf1, Leo1, Spt4, Spt5, Spt6, Spn1, and Elf1—across the Tree of Life and analyze their evolutionary patterns in a structural context. We report evidence for all 10 TEFs being present in the last eukaryotic common ancestor, indicating that mechanisms of TEF-mediated transcription regulation are both ancient and conserved. However, some early-diverging eukaryotic clades exhibit signs of altered TEF domain composition. A comparative phylogenetic analysis highlighted conserved regions of TEFs that are detected in both metazoans and fungi and other regions that appear clade-specific, detected only in metazoans. These observations, together with additional insights generated from evolutionary rate covariation analysis, shed light on under-characterized aspects of TEFs, including domains for which functions have yet to be dissected.