Abstract
The maintenance of sexual populations has been an ongoing issue for evolutionary biologists, largely due to the two-fold cost of sexual versus asexual reproduction. Many explanations have been proposed to explain the benefits of sex, including the role of recombination in maintaining diversity and the elimination of detrimental mutations, the advantage of sex in rapidly changing environments, and the role of spatial structure, finite population size and drift. Many computational models have been developed to explore theories relating to sexual populations; this paper examines the role of spatial structure in supporting sexual populations, based on work originally published in 2006 [1]. We highlight flaws in the original model and develop a simpler, more plausible model that demonstrates the role of mutation, local competition and dispersal in maintaining sexual populations.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Salathé, M., Salathé, R., Schmid-Hempel, P., Bonhoeffer, S.: Mutation accumulation in space and the maintenance of sexual reproduction. Ecology Letters 9, 941–946 (2006)
Maynard Smith, J.: The evolution of sex. Cambridge University Press (1978)
Otto, S.: The evolutionary enigma of sex. American Naturalist 174, S1–S14 (2009)
Roze, D.: Diploidy, population structure, and the evolution of recombination. American Naturalist 174, S79–S94 (2009)
Muller, H.: Our load of mutations. American Journal of Human Genetics 2(2), 111–176 (1950)
Barton, N., Charlesworth, B.: Why sex and recombination? Science 281, 1986–1989 (1998)
Campos, P., Cambadao, J., Dionisio, F., Gordo, I.: Muller’s ratchet in random graphs and scale-free networks. Physical Review E 74, 042901-1–042901-4 (2006)
West, S., Lively, C., Read, A.: A pluralist approach to sex and recombination. J. Evol. Biol. 12, 1003–1012 (1999)
Butlin, R.: The costs and benefits of sex: new insights from old asexual lineages. Nature Reviews Genetics 3, 311–317 (2002)
Kimura, M.: The neutral theory of molecular evolution. Cambridge University Press (1985)
Kimura, M.: The number of heterozygous nucleotide sites maintained in a finite population due to steady flux of mutations. Genetics 61(4), 893–903 (1969)
Tajima, F.: Statistical method for testing the neutral mutation hypothesis by dna polymorphism. Genetics 123, 585–595 (1989)
Whigham, P., Dick, G., Spencer, H.: Genetic drift on networks: Ploidy and the time to fixation. Theoretical Population Biology 74(4), 283–290 (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Whigham, P.A., Dick, G., Wright, A., Spencer, H.G. (2013). Structured Populations and the Maintenance of Sex. In: Vanneschi, L., Bush, W.S., Giacobini, M. (eds) Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics. EvoBIO 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7833. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37189-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37189-9_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37188-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37189-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)