ArticleMolecular ecology2020
No evidence for accumulation of deleterious mutations and fitness degradation in clonal fish hybrids: Abandoning sex without regrets.
Article in Molecular ecology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mutation accumulation in a hybrid parthenogenetic vertebrate.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Ancestral gene flow shaped the singular origin of the Amazon molly.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The Use of dN/dS Ratios to Investigate Types of Selection in Related Sexual and Asexual Lineages.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Review
- Repeated Independent Formation of Triploid Lineages Contributes to Clonal Diversity in Heteronotia binoei Parthenogens.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Triploidy drives vector capacity and expansion of the parthenogenetic tick Haemaphysalis longicornis.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The Influence of Genome Composition and Temperature on the Hatching Success and Development of the Offspring of AllotriploidInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Comparative analysis of multiple hybrid zones ofPlant diversity · 2025Article
- The Tree of Sex consortium: a global initiative for studying the evolution of reproduction in eukaryotes.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2025Article
- Altered Phenotypic Responses of Asexual Arctic Daphnia After 10 Years of Rapid Climate Change.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Effects of mode of reproduction on genetic polymorphism and divergence in wild yams (Dioscoreaceae:Plant diversity · 2025Article
- Apomixis and the paradox of sex in plants.Annals of botany · 2024Review
- Article
- Sperm-dependent asexual species and their role in ecology and evolution.Ecology and evolution · 2023Review
- On the evolution of variation in sexual reproduction through the prism of eukaryotic microbes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Review
- Evolution of Transcriptomes in Early-Generation Hybrids of the ApomicticInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Mitochondrial Genomes of Two AsexualInsects · 2022Article
- Article
- Genome Fractionation and Loss of Heterozygosity in Hybrids and Polyploids: Mechanisms, Consequences for Selection, and Link to Gene Function.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Challenges and Costs of Asexuality: Variation in Premeiotic Genome Duplication in Gynogenetic Hybrids fromInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2021Article
- Parthenogenesis is self-destructive for scaled reptiles.Biology letters · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite its inherent costs, sexual reproduction is ubiquitous in nature, and the mechanisms to protect it from a competitive displacement by asexuality remain unclear. Popular mutation-based explanations, like the Muller's ratchet and the Kondrashov's hatchet, assume that purifying selection may not halt the accumulation of deleterious mutations in the nonrecombining genomes, ultimately leading to their degeneration. However, empirical evidence is scarce and it remains particularly unclear whether mutational degradation proceeds fast enough to ensure the decay of clonal organisms and to prevent them from outcompeting their sexual counterparts. To test this hypothesis, we jointly analysed the exome sequences and the fitness-related phenotypic traits of the sexually reproducing fish species and their clonal hybrids, whose evolutionary ages ranged from F1 generations to 300 ky. As expected, mutations tended to accumulate in the clonal genomes in a time-dependent manner. However, contrary to the predictions, we found no trend towards increased nonsynonymity of mutations acquired by clones, nor higher radicality of their amino acid substitutions. Moreover, there was no evidence for fitness degeneration in the old clones compared with that in the younger ones. In summary, although an efficacy of purifying selection may still be reduced in the asexual genomes, our data indicate that its efficiency is not drastically decreased. Even the oldest investigated clone was found to be too young to suffer fitness consequences from a mutation accumulation. This suggests that mechanisms other than mutation accumulation may be needed to explain the competitive advantage of sex in the short term.
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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.