Biology subjects

Fielding, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Fielding, A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

The effects of group size and assortment on the evolution of division of labor

Stable variation in public-good production can generate biological division of labor. Two key drivers are the size of interacting groups and the degree of assortment (relatedness) among individuals with similar investment levels. Here we extend adaptive-dynamic models of continuous public-goods investment by allowing assortment in group formation. We show that increasing group size typically enlarges the range of benefit and cost curvatures that permit evolutionary branching, whereas assortment tends to shrink this range and prevents branching under complete relatedness. For a broad class of models, branching requires diminishing marginal public benefits and diminishing marginal private costs, with costs decreasing faster than benefits. Finally, we analyze post-branching dynamics for one and two public goods, and find that assortment can stabilize the resulting two-type division of labor. Together, these results show how group size, assortment, and payoff curvature jointly determine when heterogeneity in public-goods production can evolve.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2025

Moonlighting Role of Meiotic SYCP1 in Breast Cancer: A Chromatin-Bound Regulator of DNA Repair, Transcription, and Drug Resistance

Maintenance of genome integrity is essential for cellular homeostasis, and its perturbation leads to tumorigenesis. Here, we uncover an unanticipated somatic role for the synaptonemal complex protein SYCP1--previously regarded as strictly meiosis-specific--in a broad spectrum of human cancers including breast cancer. Through integrative genomic, proteomic, and functional analyses, we demonstrate that SYCP1 is aberrantly re-expressed in tumor cells, where it actively promotes DNA damage repair, cell cycle progression, and malignant growth. SYCP1 binds chromatin at regulatory elements and directly controls transcriptional programs governing genome maintenance, including key effectors such as CCNB1, PCNA, RAD51C, and H2AX. Loss of SYCP1 impairs DNA repair kinetics, attenuates tumor cell proliferation and migration, and increases sensitivity to chemotherapeutics cisplatin and gemcitabine. Mechanistically, SYCP1 interfaces with chromatin remodeling complexes and transcription factors SP1 and SP2, modulating their genomic occupancy and facilitating oncogenic transcriptional outputs. Clinically, high SYCP1 expression stratifies patients with poor prognosis and therapy resistance across multiple cancer types. Our findings illuminate a previously unrecognized moonlighting function of SYCP1 in somatic cancer cells and position it as a critical chromatin-associated regulator of genome stability, with implications for biomarker development and therapeutic targeting.

cancer biology↗

bioRxiv2025

Evolution of division of labor on two public goods with continuous investments

Species throughout the tree of life have evolved to produce multiple public goods, and they often exhibit division of labor, meaning that subpopulations have different allocations of effort across the goods. Despite a robust theoretical literature on mechanisms that lead to division of labor in specific domains, a general evolutionary game-theoretical analysis remains incomplete. Here we model labor as a continuous quantity and the resulting public goods as functions of labor contributed by all individuals using adaptive dynamics. We derive general conditions for the evolution of division of labor and categorize what forms of division may arise. We show that the adaptive dynamics of division of labor has three potential outcomes that differ in expected payoff and variance in payoff. Our findings indicate that the evolution of division of labor can have a diverse range of possible outcomes, with important consequences for fitness, variance in payoff, and the distribution of effort across the population.

evolutionary biology↗