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Sympatric speciation as intrinsic property of the expanding population

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Abstract

Sympatric speciation is still debatable, though some well documented empirical data that support it already exist. Our computer modeling reveals that sympatric speciation is an intrinsic property of the expanding populations with differentiated inbreeding—higher at the edges and lower inside the territory. At the edges of expanding populations, the probability of forming deleterious phenotypes by placing two defective alleles in the corresponding loci is relatively high even with low genetic load. Thus, the winning strategy is to use rather the complementary haplotypes to form zygotes. This strategy leads to a very fast sympatric speciation and specific distribution of recombination activity along the chromosomes—higher at the subtelomeric regions (close to the ends of chromosomes) and lower in the middle of chromosomes, which is also observed in all human chromosomes (excluding Y).

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Acknowledgments

We thank D. Stauffer, S. Moss de Oliveira and PMC de Oliveira for discussion. The work was supported by ESF/COST, FP6/GIACS and Polish Foundation for Science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Genomics, Faculty of Biotechnology, Wrocław University, ul. Przybyszewskiego 63/77, 51-148, Wrocław, Poland

    Wojciech Waga, Dorota Mackiewicz, Marta Zawierta & Stanisław Cebrat

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  1. Wojciech Waga
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  2. Dorota Mackiewicz
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  3. Marta Zawierta
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  4. Stanisław Cebrat
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Correspondence to Stanisław Cebrat.

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Waga, W., Mackiewicz, D., Zawierta, M. et al. Sympatric speciation as intrinsic property of the expanding population. Theory Biosci. 126, 53–59 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-007-0010-z

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