bioRxiv November 25, 2025

Biophysical constraints on mRNA decay rates shape macroevolutionary divergence in steady-state abundances

Evolutionary changes to gene expression are understood to be a major driver of phenotypic divergence between species. Researchers have investigated the drivers of this divergence by fitting evolutionary models to multi-species `omic' datasets. It is now apparent that steady-state mRNA expression levels show patterns consistent with evolutionary constraints, likely as a consequence of stabilizing selection. However, as all previous work has used bulk RNA measurements, it has been impossible to de