ArticleRoyal Society open science2020
Fitness differences suppress the number of mating types in evolving isogamous species.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 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
5 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Cell size and selection for stress-induced cell fusion in unicellular eukaryotes.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Genomic determination of breeding systems and trans-specific evolution of HD MAT genes in suilloid fungi.Genetics · 2023Article
- Parthenogenesis and the Evolution of Anisogamy.Cells · 2021Article
- Drivers of Mating Type Composition in Tetrahymena thermophila.Genome biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Invasion and Extinction Dynamics of Mating Types Under Facultative Sexual Reproduction.Genetics · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sexual reproduction is not always synonymous with the existence of two morphologically different sexes; isogamous species produce sex cells of equal size, typically falling into multiple distinct self-incompatible classes, termed mating types. A long-standing open question in evolutionary biology is: what governs the number of these mating types across species? Simple theoretical arguments imply an advantage to rare types, suggesting the number of types should grow consistently; however, empirical observations are very different. While some isogamous species exhibit thousands of mating types, such species are exceedingly rare, and most have fewer than 10. In this paper, we present a mathematical analysis to quantify the role of fitness variation-characterized by different mortality rates-in determining the number of mating types emerging in simple evolutionary models. We predict that the number of mating types decreases as the variance of mortality increases.
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