ArticleNature1997
The advantage of sex in evolving yeast populations.
Article in Nature, 1997. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
What it found
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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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 164 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mixed Outcomes in Recombination Rates After Domestication: Revisiting Theory and Data.Molecular ecology · 2025Review
- Reproductive system, temperature, and genetic background effects in experimentally evolving populations of Caenorhabditis elegans.PloS one · 2024Article
- Article
- Article
- Adaptation in Outbred Sexual Yeast is Repeatable, Polygenic and Favors Rare Haplotypes.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Conflicting effects of recombination on the evolvability and robustness in neutrally evolving populations.PLoS computational biology · 2022Review
- Analysis of the pheromone signaling pathway by RT-qPCR in the budding yeastSTAR protocols · 2022Article
- Infection by dsRNA viruses is associated with enhanced sporulation efficiency inEcology and evolution · 2022Article
- Sex alters molecular evolution in diploid experimental populations of S. cerevisiae.Nature ecology & evolution · 2020Article
- Assessing by Modeling the Consequences of Increased Recombination in Recurrent Selection ofG3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2019Article
- Microbial Experimental Evolution - a proving ground for evolutionary theory and a tool for discovery.EMBO reports · 2019Review
- Experimental Design, Population Dynamics, and Diversity in Microbial Experimental Evolution.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2018Review
- Recombination Alters the Dynamics of Adaptation on Standing Variation in Laboratory Yeast Populations.Molecular biology and evolution · 2018Article
- Sexual recombination and increased mutation rate expedite evolution of Escherichia coli in varied fitness landscapes.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Article
- Genetic Causes of Phenotypic Adaptation to the Second Fermentation of Sparkling Wines inG3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2017Article
- Fitness Effects of Thermal Stress Differ Between Outcrossing and Selfing Populations inEvolutionary biology · 2017Article
- Article
- The Fitness Effects of Spontaneous Mutations Nearly Unseen by Selection in a Bacterium with Multiple Chromosomes.Genetics · 2016Article
- Effect of manipulating recombination rates on response to selection in livestock breeding programs.Genetics, selection, evolution : GSE · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sex is a general feature of the life cycle of eukaryotes. It is not universal, however, as many organisms seem to lack sex entirely. The widespread occurrence of sex is puzzling, both because meiotic recombination can disrupt co-adapted combinations of genes, and because it halves the potential rate of reproduction in organisms with strongly differentiated male and female gametes. Most attempts to explain the maintenance of sexuality invoke differences between parents and sexual offspring. These differences may be advantageous in novel or changing environments if new gene combinations are favoured from time to time. Sex would then serve to concentrate beneficial mutations that have arisen independently into the same line of descent. But in a stable environment sex might serve to concentrate deleterious mutations, so that they will be more effectively purged from the population by selection. We have studied the effect of sex on mean fitness in experimental populations of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Our results show that sex increases mean fitness in an environment to which the populations were well adapted, but not in an environment to which new adaptation occurred, supporting the hypothesis that the advantage of sexuality lay in the removal of deleterious mutations.
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Registered trials
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.