New paper: Consequences of asexuality in natural populations: insights from stick insects
Featured in Nature Research Highlights: Sex pays off for stick insects despite costs
We empirically tested theoretical predictions of the genomic consequences of asexuality using 5 Timema sex-asex sister pairs that are ecologically similar:
- signatures of arrested GC-biased gene conversion in asexuals that correspond to the timeframe of asexuality
- reduced levels of polymorphism consistent with some form of automixis and/or background selection
- less effective purifying selection in fixed and segregating mutations in asexuals
- unexpected: asexuals harbor more transcript variants (maybe translational errors? or some way to generate novelty?)