ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Mating preferences can drive expansion or contraction of major histocompatibility complex gene family.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 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
3 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sex-Dependent Influence of Major Histocompatibility Complex Diversity on Fitness in a Social Mammal.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Long-Read Genome Assemblies Reveal Extraordinary Variation in the Number and Structure of MHC Loci in Birds.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Mating preferences can drive expansion or contraction of major histocompatibility complex gene family.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Major histocompatibility complex (MHC)-based mating rules can evolve as a way to avoid inbreeding or to increase offspring immune competence. While the role of mating preference in shaping the MHC diversity in vertebrates has been acknowledged, its impact on individual MHC diversity has not been considered. Here, we use computer simulations to investigate how simple mating rules favouring MHC-dissimilar partners affect the evolution of the number of MHC variants in individual genomes, accompanying selection for resistance to parasites. We showed that the effect of such preferences could sometimes be dramatic. If preferences are aimed at avoiding identical alleles, the equilibrium number of MHC alleles is much smaller than under random mating. However, if the mating rule minimizes the ratio of shared to different alleles in partners, MHC number is higher than under random mating. Additionally, our simulations revealed that a negative correlation between the numbers of MHC variants in mated individuals can arise from simple rules of MHC-disassortative mating. Our results reveal unexpected potential of MHC-based mating preferences to drive MHC gene family expansions or contractions and highlight the need to study the mechanistic basis of such preferences, which is currently poorly understood.
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