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GeezerVison is showing era.ed.ac.uk — Sex releases the speed limit on evolution Sex releases the speed limit on evolutionItem Status Embargo End Date Date Authors Abstract Explaining the evolutionary maintenance of sex remains a key
problem in evolutionary biology (1–3). One potential benefit of sex
is that it may allow a more rapid adaptive response when
environmental conditions change, by increasing the efficiency
with which selection can fix beneficial mutations (4–7). Here I show
that sex can increase the rate of adaptation in the facultatively
sexual single-celled chlorophyte Chlamydomonas reinhardtii,
but that the benefits of sex depend crucially on the size of the
population that is adapting: sex has a marked effect in large
populations but little effect in small populations. Several mechanisms
have been proposed to explain the benefits of sex in a novel
environment, including stochastic effects in small populations,
clonal interference and epistasis between beneficial alleles. These
results indicate that clonal interference is important in this
system. This item appears in the following Collection(s) |
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