ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2014
The costs of being male: are there sex-specific effects of uniparental mitochondrial inheritance?
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 96 citations in OpenAlex.
- Optimal Organelle Inheritance Strategies Under Different Changing Environments and Mutational Pressures.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- The need to understand the underlying mechanisms associated with mitochondrial therapies in assisted reproduction before further clinical trials are performed.Human reproduction (Oxford, England) · 2026Review
- The nuclear and mitochondrial genomes need to tango. How is their dance synchronized during development?NAR molecular medicine · 2026Article
- Sex difference in human diseases: mechanistic insights and clinical implications.Signal transduction and targeted therapy · 2024Review
- Evolution and maintenance of mtDNA gene content across eukaryotes.The Biochemical journal · 2024Review
- The role of mitochondria in sex- and age-specific gene expression in a species without sex chromosomes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Mother's Curse effects on lifespan and aging.Frontiers in aging · 2024Review
- The role of mitochondria in sex- and age-specific gene expression in a species without sex chromosomes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Review
- Gender Differences in Oxidative Stress in Relation to Cancer Susceptibility and Survival.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Genetic and Epigenetic Sexual Dimorphism of Brain Cells during Aging.Brain sciences · 2023Review
- Sex-specific DNA methylation and associations withEpigenetics · 2022Article
- Investigating the Impact of a Curse: Diseases, Population Isolation, Evolution and the Mother's Curse.Genes · 2022Review
- Effects of mitochondrial haplotype on pre-copulatory mating success in male fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster).Journal of evolutionary biology · 2022Article
- Widespread genomic signatures of reproductive isolation and sex-specific selection in the Eastern Yellow Robin, Eopsaltria australis.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2022Article
- Review
- Adaptive co-evolution of mitochondria and the Y-chromosome: A resolution to conflict between evolutionary opponents.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- The Role of Mitochondria in Carcinogenesis.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Mental Health, Mitochondria, and the Battle of the Sexes.Biomedicines · 2021Review
- Cancer and Tumour Suppressor p53 Encounters at the Juncture of Sex Disparity.Frontiers in genetics · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Eukaryotic cells typically contain numerous mitochondria, each with multiple copies of their own genome, the mtDNA. Uniparental transmission of mitochondria, usually via the mother, prevents the mixing of mtDNA from different individuals. While on the one hand, this should resolve the potential for selection for fast-replicating mtDNA variants that reduce organismal fitness, maternal inheritance will, in theory, come with another set of problems that are specifically relevant to males. Maternal inheritance implies that the mitochondrial genome is never transmitted through males, and thus selection can target only the mtDNA sequence when carried by females. A consequence is that mtDNA mutations that confer male-biased phenotypic expression will be prone to evade selection, and accumulate. Here, we review the evidence from the ecological, evolutionary and medical literature for male specificity of mtDNA mutations affecting fertility, health and ageing. While such effects have been discovered experimentally in the laboratory, their relevance to natural populations--including the human population--remains unclear. We suggest that the existence of male expression-biased mtDNA mutations is likely to be a broad phenomenon, but that these mutations remain cryptic owing to the presence of counter-adapted nuclear compensatory modifier mutations, which offset their deleterious effects.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.