Evolution, Origin of Life, Concepts and Methods

Pierre Pontarotti Directeur de Recherche CNRS Aix Marseille Univ IRD, APHM, MEPHI, IHU Méditerranée Infection Marseille France pierre.pontarotti@univ-amu.fr

Part I: Origin of Life, A Non-paradoxical Pathway for the Chemical Evolution toward the Most Primitive RNA-based Life-like System.- Formation of Nucleosides and Nucleotides in Chemical Evolution.- The First Universal Common Ancestor (FUCA) as the earliest ancestor of LUCA's (Last UCA) lineage.- Part II: Concepts and Methods, Repeatability and predictability in experimental evolution.- RetroSpect, a new method of measuring gene regulatory evolution rates using co-mapping of genomic functional features with transposable elements.- Methods to Detect and Associate Divergence in cis-regulatory elements to Phenotypic Divergence.- A look back over 20 years of evo-devo studies on sponges: a challenged view of Urmetazoa.- A geometric morphometrics-based mapping model of leaf shape evolution.- Allostery and Structural Dynamics in Protein Evolution.- Coevolutionary approaches to the science of language.- Part III: Genome and Phenotype Evolution, The parallel lives of human Y-chromosome lineages across the Strait of Gibraltar.- Vertebrate genome size and the impact of transposable elements in genome evolution.- Genetic Diversity of the Apoptotic Pathway in Insects.- Xenacoelomorpha, a key group to understand Bilaterian Evolution: Morphological and Molecular Perspectives.- Cooperation and Competition in Mammalian Evolution-gene domestication from LTR Retrotransposons.