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Welcome to the Annual Meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution in Yokohama, Japan (July 8–12, 2018) This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Neutral Theory. The editorial board of Molecular Biology and Evolution has assembled this special reprint issue to celebrate the continuing impact of Motoo Kimura’s proposal of “The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution” in 1968 and the nearly concurrent publication with a similar theme, “Non-Darwinian Evolution,” by Jack Lester King and Thomas Jukes. The Neutral Theory has had tremendous and continuing impact on the study of molecular evolution, showing immediate utility as a valuable counterpoint to strict selectionist views and as a null hypothesis that enables statistical detection of selective pressures at genomic loci. As the years have progressed, interpretations of the neutral theory have been impacted by empirical developments, including technological advances that enable rigorous investigation of hypotheses stimulated by the Neutral Theory. In parallel, theoretical refinements have affected our understanding of how population size and other demographic parameters influence our assessment of variation as neutral or nearly so, as well as our awareness that the impact of genetic variation on organismal fitness can be affected by complex interactions including epistatic and environmental factors. To capture this impact and modern perspectives, MBE invited all members of the editorial board to reflect on how the Neutral Theory specifically impacts their own research and intellectual community. Many of our editors have made contributions and presented a broad array of views, covering theory and applications for study systems ranging from microbial to human populations. Several perspectives explicitly address the longstanding and often uneasy relationship between selection and neu- trality, while others suggest expansion of classic neutral theory to consider evolution at non-molecular scales, such as phenotypic and cultural evolution. With the addition of perspectives adding specialized focus on the influence of neutral theory in fields such as cancer genomics, personalized medicine, pathogen evolution, and conservation genomics, we hope that our readers will find that, even after 50 years, the neutral theory of molecular evolution has an enduring capacity to fuel scientific thought and debate. In addition to these new perspectives, we have chosen to reprint two classic articles that represent the Neutral Theory and its applications as published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. In keeping with MBE’s strong tradition in publishing analytical tools for molecular evolutionary analysis, we also invited authors of widely-used resources to contribute software and database updates. Coincidentally, this year marks the 25th anniversary of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) software, which has had enduring utility for the MBE community. This special issue contains an announcement of the first cross-platform version of this software (MEGA X), and an associated News story. The contents of this special issue bring together past and future thought and action; we hope that they spark discussion that is anything but neutral.

Heather Rowe and Sudhir Kumar Editorial

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