Applications to the Gordon Research Seminar in Speciation are now open! We encourage PhD students & postdocs from all geographies, backgrounds, disciplines to APPLY!
This 2d seminar in beautiful Lucca 🇮🇹 will be followed by a 5d conference open to the broader community.
www.grc.org/speciation-g...
5. This implies that only some lineages overcome the initial fitness valley to become the successful obligate asexuals we later observe in nature. If general, such early fitness valleys during sex–asex transitions may be key to resolving the evolutionary “paradox of sex.”
4. They also showed reduced fertility compared to natural obligate asexuals, especially during asexual reproduction. This suggests that creating new asexuals by contagion is more complex than previously thought and may result in diverse, non-clonal offspring, on which subsequent selection can act.
3. But surprisingly, most new lineages able to reproduce asexually were facultative: capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction. When reproducing asexually, these lineages differ from their obligate asexual fathers and produced non-clonal offspring.
2. We used contagious asexuality: Rare males from obligate asexual lineages transmit asexuality to sexual females through mating. Some of the newly generated lineages are expected to be obligate asexuals.
The final part of the story: "The arduous path to obligate asexuality in Daphnia" is out in #ProcB 🥳 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article.... 1. Instead of comparing long-established asexuals to sexuals, we generated new asexual lineages to observe the transition in action.
The arduous path to obligate asexuality in #Daphnia #ProcB #OpenAccess #Evolution #Genetics royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
Stay tuned!! More will come soon about the intricate and complicated life cycle of Daphnia 🤭!!!!
Even at very low frequency, rare sex can reduce the long-term costs of asexuality while avoiding most costs of sex. Our results reveal a previously unknown reproductive pathway in Daphnia and suggest that cryptic sex may be more common than previously thought.
1,268 and 636 males were regularly added over ~2-3 months. We collected embryos from diapause eggs, extracted DNA, and tested for paternal alleles. A few embryos carried genetic material from the males, showing that sexual reproduction had occurred, even though most reproduction remained asexual.
Females from obligate asexual lineages were allowed to reproduce clonally in large buckets, using genotypes that cannot produce males. We then carried out 2 independent experiments, each involving a different lineage of asexual females and a different lineage of sexual males.
We brought together sexual lineages (left part, produce diapause eggs after fertilization by males), and obligate parthenogenetic lineages (right part 'asexual', produce these eggs asexually).
Rare Sex in “Obligate” Asexuals. Earlier this year, I was pleased that the first part of our work on Daphnia reproductive modes was published in JEB doi.org/10.1093/jeb/.... In brief, females from so-called obligate parthenogenetic lineages, are in fact able to rarely reproduce sexually.
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Olfaction written in bones 👃🧠🦴🧬
Thrilled to see our latest study showing that the olfactory bulb endocast is a reliable proxy for mammalian olfaction, now published in @pnas.org
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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What’s your favorite Wildlife Photographer of the Year image?
Mine is the gathering of treefrogs by my friend and colleague Quentin Martinez : @quentinwildlife.bsky.social
www.nhm.ac.uk/wpy/gallery/...
