ArticleNature2016
Sex speeds adaptation by altering the dynamics of molecular evolution.
Article in Nature, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 175 papers.
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Who cites it
175 citing papers in PubMed, 465 citations in OpenAlex.
- Transgenerational chromosome repair in the asexual bdelloid rotiferScience advances · 2026Article
- Upper bound on the mutational burden imposed by a CRISPR-Cas9 gene-drive element.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2026Article
- Evolutionary Simulations Reveal Role for Genomic Recombination in the Evolution of Gene Regulatory Network Complexity and Robustness.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation by purging hitchhiking load.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Ufd2p promotes efficient crossover formation by destabilizing Top2p during meiosis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Evolutionary responses to increased opportunity for sexual selection in yeast.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- An Increase in Male Recombination Rate With Age in Dairy Cattle Is Heritable and Polygenic.Journal of animal breeding and genetics = Zeitschrift fur Tierzuchtung und Zuchtungsbiologie · 2026Article
- Article
- amh alleles on XY sex chromosomes regulate male differentiation in amphidiploid Carassius auratus.Science China. Life sciences · 2026Article
- Mixed Outcomes in Recombination Rates After Domestication: Revisiting Theory and Data.Molecular ecology · 2025Review
- Evolutionary responses to increased opportunity for sexual selection in yeast.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Reproductive Isolation due to Divergent Ecological Selection Is Accompanied by Vast Genomic Instability in Experimentally Evolved Yeast Populations.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Enhancing local meiotic crossovers in Arabidopsis and maize through juxtaposition of heterozygous and homozygous regions.Nature plants · 2025Article
- Effects of chromosome number reduction on mitotic and meiotic stability in fission yeast.Genome biology · 2025Article
- Unraveling the tempo and mode of horizontal gene transfer in bacteria.Trends in microbiology · 2025Review
- Experimental Test of Evolutionary Safety of a CRISPR-Cas9 Gene-Drive Element.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Converging or diverging? Shape coevolution between a sperm-dependent asexual and its sexual hosts.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Genetic dissection of MutL complexes in Arabidopsis meiosis.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Lineage-specific variation in frequency and hotspots of recombination in invasive Escherichia coli.BMC genomics · 2025Article
- The dynamics of loss of heterozygosity events in genomes.EMBO reports · 2025Review
115 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Sex and recombination are pervasive throughout nature despite their substantial costs. Understanding the evolutionary forces that maintain these phenomena is a central challenge in biology. One longstanding hypothesis argues that sex is beneficial because recombination speeds adaptation. Theory has proposed several distinct population genetic mechanisms that could underlie this advantage. For example, sex can promote the fixation of beneficial mutations either by alleviating interference competition (the Fisher-Muller effect) or by separating them from deleterious load (the ruby in the rubbish effect). Previous experiments confirm that sex can increase the rate of adaptation, but these studies did not observe the evolutionary dynamics that drive this effect at the genomic level. Here we present the first, to our knowledge, comparison between the sequence-level dynamics of adaptation in experimental sexual and asexual Saccharomyces cerevisiae populations, which allows us to identify the specific mechanisms by which sex speeds adaptation. We find that sex alters the molecular signatures of evolution by changing the spectrum of mutations that fix, and confirm theoretical predictions that it does so by alleviating clonal interference. We also show that substantially deleterious mutations hitchhike to fixation in adapting asexual populations. In contrast, recombination prevents such mutations from fixing. Our results demonstrate that sex both speeds adaptation and alters its molecular signature by allowing natural selection to more efficiently sort beneficial from deleterious mutations.
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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.