3 documents found, page 1 of 1
Microbes are potential key players in the evolution of life histories and aging...
Santos, Josiane; Matos, Margarida; Flatt, Thomas; Chelo, Ivo MMicrobes can have profound effects on host fitness and health and the appearance of late-onset diseases. Host–microbe interactions thus represent a major environmental context for healthy aging of the host and might also mediate trade-offs between life-history traits in the evolution of host senescence. Here, we have used the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to study how host–microbe interactions may modulate th...
How chromosomal inversions reorient the evolutionary process
Berdan, Emma L.; Barton, Nicholas H.; Butlin, Roger; Charlesworth, Brian; Faria, Rui; De mendonça fragata almeida, Inês; Gilbert, Kimberly J.; Jay, PaulInversions are structural mutations that reverse the sequence of a chromosome segment and reduce the effective rate of recombination in the heterozygous state. They play a major role in adaptation, as well as in other evolutionary processes such as speciation. Although inversions have been studied since the 1920s, they remain difficult to investigate because the reduced recombination conferred by them strengthe...
Mutation accumulation opposes polymorphism: supergenes and the curious case of ...
Berdan, Emma L.; Blanckaert, Alexandre; Butlin, Roger K.; Flatt, Thomas; Slotte, Tanja; Wielstra, BenSupergenes offer spectacular examples of long-term balancing selection in nature, but their origin and maintenance remain a mystery. Reduced recombination between arrangements, a critical aspect of many supergenes, protects adaptive multi-trait phenotypes but can lead to mutation accumulation. Mutation accumulation can stabilize the system through the emergence of associative overdominance (AOD), destabilize th...