EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The advantage of sex in evolving yeast populations

Clifford Zeyl () and Graham Bell
Additional contact information
Clifford Zeyl: *Center for Microbial Ecology, Michigan State University
Graham Bell: McGill University

Nature, 1997, vol. 388, issue 6641, 465-468

Abstract: Abstract Sex is a general feature of the life cycle of eukaryotes. It is not universal, however, as many organisms seem to lack sex entirely1. The widespread occurrence of sex is puzzling, both because meiotic recombination can disrupt co-adapted combinations of genes, and because it halves the potential rate of reproduction in organisms with strongly differentiated male and female gametes2. Most attempts to explain the maintenance of sexuality invoke differences between parents and sexual offspring. These differences may be advantageous in novel or changing environments if new gene combinations are favoured from time to time1. Sex would then serve to concentrate beneficial mutations that have arisen independently into the same line of descent. But in a stable environment sex might serve to concentrate deleterious mutations, so that they will be more effectively purged from the population by selection3. We have studied the effect of sex on mean fitness in experimental populations of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Our results show that sex increases mean fitness in an environment to which the populations were well adapted, but not in an environment to which new adaptation occurred, supporting the hypothesis that the advantage of sexuality lay in the removal of deleterious mutations.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/41312 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nature:v:388:y:1997:i:6641:d:10.1038_41312

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

DOI: 10.1038/41312

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

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

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:388:y:1997:i:6641:d:10.1038_41312