Effective purifying selection in ancient asexual oribatid mites

Alexander Brandt (), Ina Schaefer, Julien Glanz, Tanja Schwander, Mark Maraun, Stefan Scheu and Jens Bast ()
Additional contact information
Alexander Brandt: Georg-August-University Goettingen
Ina Schaefer: Georg-August-University Goettingen
Julien Glanz: Georg-August-University Goettingen
Tanja Schwander: University of Lausanne
Mark Maraun: Georg-August-University Goettingen
Stefan Scheu: Georg-August-University Goettingen
Jens Bast: University of Lausanne

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Sex is beneficial in the long term because it can prevent mutational meltdown through increased effectiveness of selection. This idea is supported by empirical evidence of deleterious mutation accumulation in species with a recent transition to asexuality. Here, we study the effectiveness of purifying selection in oribatid mites which have lost sex millions of years ago and diversified into different families and species while reproducing asexually. We compare the accumulation of deleterious nonsynonymous and synonymous mutations between three asexual and three sexual lineages using transcriptome data. Contrasting studies of young asexual lineages, we find evidence for strong purifying selection that is more effective in asexual as compared to sexual oribatid mite lineages. Our results suggest that large populations likely sustain effective purifying selection and facilitate the escape of mutational meltdown in the absence of sex. Thus, sex per se is not a prerequisite for the long-term persistence of animal lineages.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01002-8 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-017-01002-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01002-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().