ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
What do isogamous organisms teach us about sex and the two sexes?
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Meiotic cohesin Rec8 imposes fitness costs on fission yeast gametes favoring the evolution of parental bias in gene expression.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Biological Sex Is Binary and Rooted in Anisogamy.Ecology letters · 2026Review
- Navigating the Semantic Labyrinth of "Sex" in the Study of Reproductive Trait Evolution.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- The Tree of Sex consortium: a global initiative for studying the evolution of reproduction in eukaryotes.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2025Article
- Temperature Variation Regulates the Trade-Off Between Pre- and Post-Hatching Investment in a Burying Beetle.Insects · 2025Article
- Testis- and ovary-expressed polo-like kinase transcripts and gene duplications affect male fertility when expressed in the Drosophila melanogaster germline.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2025Article
- The correlation between anisogamy and sexual selection intensity-the broad theoretical predictions.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- On the resolution of sexual conflict over shared traits.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Fossil-calibrated molecular clock data enable reconstruction of steps leading to differentiated multicellularity and anisogamy in the Volvocine algae.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Hermaphroditic origins of anisogamy.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Rampant nuclear-mitochondrial-plastid phylogenomic discordance in globally distributed calcifying microalgae.The New phytologist · 2022Article
- Bateman gradients from first principles.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Sex in protists: A new perspective on the reproduction mechanisms of trypanosomatids.Genetics and molecular biology · 2022Article
- Sperm bauplan and function and underlying processes of sperm formation and selection.Physiological reviews · 2022Review
- Asymmetric mating behavior of isogamous budding yeast.Science advances · 2021Article
- A comparative test of the gamete dynamics theory for the evolution of anisogamy in Bryopsidales green algae.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Drivers of Mating Type Composition in Tetrahymena thermophila.Genome biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Fitness differences suppress the number of mating types in evolving isogamous species.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Invasion and Extinction Dynamics of Mating Types Under Facultative Sexual Reproduction.Genetics · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Isogamy is a reproductive system where all gametes are morphologically similar, especially in terms of size. Its importance goes beyond specific cases: to this day non-anisogamous systems are common outside of multicellular animals and plants, they can be found in all eukaryotic super-groups, and anisogamous organisms appear to have isogamous ancestors. Furthermore, because maleness is synonymous with the production of small gametes, an explanation for the initial origin of males and females is synonymous with understanding the transition from isogamy to anisogamy. As we show here, this transition may also be crucial for understanding why sex itself remains common even in taxa with high costs of male production (the twofold cost of sex). The transition to anisogamy implies the origin of male and female sexes, kickstarts the subsequent evolution of sex roles, and has a major impact on the costliness of sexual reproduction. Finally, we combine some of the consequences of isogamy and anisogamy in a thought experiment on the maintenance of sexual reproduction. We ask what happens if there is a less than twofold benefit to sex (not an unlikely scenario as large short-term benefits have proved difficult to find), and argue that this could lead to a situation where lineages that evolve anisogamy-and thus the highest costs of sex-end up being associated with constraints that make invasion by asexual reproduction unlikely (the 'anisogamy gateway' hypothesis).This article is part of the themed issue 'Weird sex: the underappreciated diversity of sexual reproduction'.
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