Evolution and the potato

In a new report, it seems that evolutionary phylogenetic methods have uncovered that the humble potato was domesticated just once, from a wild root in southern Peru. Why does this matter? Well, if it comes from one locale, it is more susceptible to a single pathogen. As potatoes are one of the most widely used staple crops in the world, that could be rather important.

Also in PNAS, a number of other items to do with evolution. Shucks, you'd almost think nothing in biology made sense except in the light of evolution.

• Spontaneous evolution of modularity and network motifs
• Genome analysis of multiple pathogenic isolates of Streptococcus agalactiae: Implications for the microbial "pan-genome"
• An evolutionary proteomics approach identifies substrates of the cAMP-dependent protein kinase

and so on...