Netherlands Evolutionary Biology Prize
Since 2019, NLSEB awards a prize for the best peer-reviewed paper in evolutionary biology published each year. This Netherlands Evolutionary Biology Prize is awarded to the first or last author of the selected paper in recognition of their achievement. In addition to the prize of EUR 500, the winner is invited to present their paper in a 20 minutes plenary lecture at the next NLSEB meeting.
Netherlands Evolutionary Biology 2022 Prize call
NLSEB will award the Netherlands Evolutionary Biology Prize for the best peer-reviewed paper in evolutionary biology published in 2022 by an author who is affiliated with a Dutch research institution. The prize will be awarded to the first or last author of the selected paper, who will receive €500 in recognition of her or his achievement. In addition, the winner will be allowed to present their paper in a plenary lecture at the annual NLSEB congress in 2023.
All NLSEB members are invited to submit nominations. In order to nominate a first or last author of a paper on evolutionary biology, please send a PDF of the manuscript and a brief motivation (no more than half a page) by e-mail to prize@nlseb.nl. Deadline for the submission of nominations is January 31, 2023.
Eligible nominations will be evaluated by a jury consisting of Prof. Duur Aanen, Dr. Liedewij Laan and Dr. Koen Verhoeven, who will be in charge of selecting the winning paper. The following eligibility criteria apply:
• Nominated papers must have been published online or in print within the year 2022, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal
• Papers can only be nominated by members of NLSEB; nominating a paper of your own is allowed. Each member can nominate maximum two papers
• The first/last author of the nominated paper was affiliated with a Dutch research institution at the time the research was executed; they need not necessarily be a member of NLSEB
Past winners
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Winner of the Netherlands Evolutionary Biology 2021 Prize
The winner of the Netherlands Evolutionary Biology prize for the best publication in evolutionary biology published in 2021 is:
The prize has been awarded to the senior author, Jean-Christophe Billeter, from the University of Groningen.
The publication unravels a mechanism in Drosophila that solves a fundamental dilemma of mate choice: how can females make sure that they are choosy enough to mate with a high-quality partner, without running the risk of remaining unmated because they are too choosy? The answer to this dilemma, at least for species that can store sperm from multiple matings such as the fruit fly, is to be not choosy with first matings, but to become increasingly choosy with subsequent matings. This publication unravels the mechanism of such plasticity in female choosiness that is mating status-dependent. After mating, a sex peptide from the male ejaculate upregulates a hormone that desentisizes the female olfactory receptors to male pheromones. As a result, mated females are attracted only to males that produce more pheromones, which is a proxy for male quality. The work integrates theory and mechanism, and is impressive in its empirical unraveling of the mechanism of plasticity in female choosiness. The empirical demonstration of this mechanism uses a series of elegant experiments that are diverse and comprehensive: multi-layered evidence is provided by a combination of behavioural assays, functional genetics, single neuron manipulations, electrophysiology, pharmaceutical treatments, analytic chemistry, and RNA-sequencing. The work is proximate in nature, but has important implications for understanding mate choice and its evolution. For instance, it can explain how sexual selection can be relaxed to avoid extinction when population density is low. It also emphasizes that sexual selection can be the domain of mated, not virgin, females, which has ramification for the evolution of male sexual traits.
Jury of the 2021 NL Evol Biol Prize: Prof. Paulien Hogeweg, Dr. Marjon de Vos and Dr. Koen Verhoeven
At the NLSEB2022 meeting on 28 June 2022 at Akoesticum (Ede), Jean-Christophe was aware the prize (€500) and gave a plenary lecture on his prize-winning work
Winner of the Netherlands Evolutionary Biology 2020 Prize
Congratulations to Zheren Zang for winning the Netherlands Evolutionary Biology 2020 prize! The award includes a cash prize of €500 and the offer to present a plenary lecture at NLSEB2021.
Jury report
“The winner of the Netherlands Evolutionary Biology prize for the best publication in evolutionary biology published in 2020 is:
The prize will be awarded to the first author, Zheren Zhang, who did this work as a PhD student at the Leiden University Institute of Biology. The publication describes the discovery of a fascinating mechanism of division of labor in bacteria, which provides new insight into bacterial social evolution. Colonies of the multicellular Streptomyces coelicolor produce hypermutant cell types that show frequent genomic deletions, rearrangements and amplifications. These cell types suffer strongly reduced sporulation, becoming effectively sterile, but show an increase in the production and diversity of antibiotic compounds, which provides competitive benefits in the soil environment. While a trade-off between sporulation and antibiotic production is evident at the individual level, the colony shows no reduction in spore production as long as the hypermutant antibiotic-producing cells remain a minority fraction, while the whole colony benefits in competitive environments from the antibiotics produced by these cells. The resulting division of labor, including the production of a terminally differentiated “sterile caste”, closely parallels related behaviors in social insects, and seems to develop de novo in colonies via the production of hypervariable mutants with unstable genomes. The study exposed this phenomenon using a combination of different methods, including genomic sequencing, bacterial growth and fitness assays, proteomics and NMR profiling. The results are well-presented and convincing. The jury was excited about the novelty of the mechanism that was discovered. This work clarifies why and how division of labor develops within colonies, and highlights the sophisticated social strategies that can evolve in microbes.”
Prof. Paulien Hogeweg, Dr. Marjon de Vos and Dr. Koen Verhoeven
Jury of the 2020 Netherlands Evolutionary Biology prize
Winner of the Netherlands Evolutionary Biology 2019 Prize
Congratulations to Langqing Liu for winning the Netherlands Evolutionary Biology 2019 prize! The award includes a cash prize of €500 and the offer to present a plenary lecture at NLSEB2021, as NLSEB2020 was canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Jury report
“The winner of the Netherlands Evolutionary Biology prize for the best publication in evolutionary biology published in 2019 is the paper by Langqing Liu and coauthors: Genomic analysis on pygmy hog reveals extensive interbreeding during wild boar expansion (Nature Communications 10, Article number: 1992 (2019)). This paper analyzes the genomes of the endangered Pygmy hog, and compares them to the genomes of individuals from nine other wild pig species, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of pig species. This evolutionary history is characterized by the recent successful expansion of one species, Wild boar, across a large geographic range, which completely replaced other pig species from the area; the Pygmy hog is the only surviving pig species that has not gone extinct in the Wild boar expansion area. The paper demonstrates that the expanding Wild boar did not simply replace the existing species, but it ‘absorbed’ them: clear evidence is presented of admixture between Wild boar and other pig species that it encountered during colonization, including Pygmy hog, whereby Wild boar incorporated genetic information from these other species into its genome. The authors argue that such admixture can have contributed significantly to the colonizing success of Wild boar, as the incorporation of genetic information from other species can have provided a genetic basis for adaptation to local environments encountered during colonization. The paper is a well-written and exciting example of how new genomic information can be used to infer evolutionary histories of species, and moreover to address the role that admixture plays in successful colonization. The jury was impressed by the comprehensive population genomic analyses, which produced clear results. These results have broad impact on the question what makes some species successful colonizers, which is a question that is relevant in many taxa.”
Prof. Paulien Hogeweg, Prof. Sander Tans and Dr. Koen Verhoeven
Jury of the Netherlands Evolutionary Biology prize