Overview
The Journal of Molecular Evolution has expanded its scope and editorial board. To introduce our expanded journal and editors, with support from Springer Nature, American University, and the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine at Temple University, we proudly present the Journal of Molecular Evolution Advances Meeting. This meeting with free registration on the American University campus in Washington, D.C., will feature invited talks from editorial board members, selected talks from submitted abstracts, a poster session, and presentations for new investigators on the US funding landscape for molecular evolution from both an NSF program officer (Evolutionary Processes) and a NASA Astrobiology program officer.
The Journal of Molecular Evolution has a long history of serving the molecular evolution community. It was founded in 1971 by luminary scientist Emile Zuckerkandl and has had a long history of publishing fundamental advances, such as molecular phylogenetics. As the journal progresses in 2020 and beyond, we hope to recapture that history and embrace publication in many areas involving computational methods and theory related to molecular evolution.
The Journal of Molecular Evolution covers experimental, computational, and theoretical work aimed at deciphering features of molecular evolution and the processes bearing on these features, from the initial formation of macromolecular systems through their evolution at the molecular level, the co-evolution of their functions in cellular and organismal systems, and their influence on organismal adaptation, speciation, and ecology.
Topics addressed in the journal include the evolution of informational macromolecules and their relation to more complex levels of biological organization, including populations and taxa, as well as the molecular basis for the evolution of ecological interactions of species and the use of molecular data to infer fundamental processes in evolutionary ecology. This coverage accommodates such subfields as new genome sequences, comparative structural and functional genomics, population genetics, the molecular evolution of development, the evolution of gene regulation and gene interaction networks, and in vitro evolution of DNA and RNA, molecular evolutionary ecology, and the development of methods and theory that enable molecular evolutionary inference, including but not limited to, phylogenetic methods.