Abstract：
BACKGROUND:The self-fertile hermaphrodite worm C. elegans is an important model organism for biology, yet little is known about the origin and persistence of the self-fertilizing mode of reproduction in this lineage. Recent work has demonstrated an extraordinary degree of selfing combined with a high deleterious mutation rate in contemporary populations. These observations raise the question as to whether the mutation load might rise to such a degree as to eventually threaten the species with extinction. The potential for such a process to occur would inform our understanding of the time since the origin of self-fertilization in C. elegans history. RESULTS:To address this issue, here we quantify the rate of fitness decline expected to occur via Muller's ratchet for a purely selfing population, using both analytical approximations and globally distributed individual-based simulations from the evolution@home system to compute the rate of deleterious mutation accumulation. Using the best available estimates for parameters of how C. elegans evolves, we conclude that pure selfing can persist for only short evolutionary intervals, and is expected to lead to extinction within thousands of years for a plausible portion of parameter space. Credible lower-bound estimates of nuclear mutation rates do not extend the expected time to extinction much beyond a million years. CONCLUSION:Thus we conclude that either the extreme self-fertilization implied by current patterns of genetic variation in C. elegans arose relatively recently or that low levels of outcrossing and other factors are key to the persistence of C. elegans into the present day. We also discuss results for the mitochondrial genome and the implications for C. briggsae, a close relative that made the transition to selfing independently of C. elegans.
journal_name
BMC Evol Bioljournal_title
BMC evolutionary biologyauthors
Loewe L,Cutter ADdoi
10.1186/1471-2148-8-125subject
Has Abstractpub_date
2008-04-30 00:00:00pages
125issn
1471-2148pii
1471-2148-8-125journal_volume
8pub_type
杂志文章abstract：BACKGROUND:Glycolysis and subsequent fermentation is the main energy source for many anaerobic organisms. The glycolytic pathway consists of ten enzymatic steps which appear to be universal amongst eukaryotes. However, it has been shown that the origins of these enzymes in specific eukaryote lineages can differ, and so...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-6-101
更新日期：2006-11-23 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Although selection favors exploitative competition within groups, a group of hypercompetitive individuals may be less productive than a cooperative group. When competition is costly for group fitness, among-group selection can favor groups with 'policing' individuals who reduce within-group competition at a ...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-7-203
更新日期：2007-10-25 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Bacterial populations are highly successful at colonizing new habitats and adapting to changing environmental conditions, partly due to their capacity to evolve novel virulence and metabolic pathways in response to stress conditions and to shuffle them by horizontal gene transfer (HGT). A common theme in the...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-11-273
更新日期：2011-09-26 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:The coral skeleton consists of CaCO3 deposited upon an organic matrix primarily as aragonite. Currently galaxin, from Galaxea fascicularis, is the only soluble protein component of the organic matrix that has been characterized from a coral. Three genes related to galaxin were identified in the coral Acropor...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-9-178
更新日期：2009-07-29 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Many earthworm species demonstrate significant cryptic diversity, with several highly diverged mitochondrial lineages found within most of the taxa studied to date. The status of differences between these lineages on the nuclear level is still unclear. Because of widespread polyploidy in earthworms, most stu...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/s12862-019-1370-y
更新日期：2019-02-26 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:The Carpathians and the Alps are the largest mountain ranges of the European Alpine System and important centres of endemism. Among the distinctive endemic species of this area is Saxifraga wahlenbergii, a Western Carpathians member of the speciose genus Saxifraga. It was frequently considered a taxonomicall...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/s12862-019-1355-x
更新日期：2019-01-11 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Lymnaeidae snails play a prominent role in the transmission of helminths, mainly trematodes of medical and veterinary importance (e.g., Fasciola liver flukes). As this family exhibits a great diversity in shell morphology but extremely homogeneous anatomical traits, the systematics of Lymnaeidae has long bee...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-10-381
更新日期：2010-12-09 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:The completion of 19 insect genome sequencing projects spanning six insect orders provides the opportunity to investigate the evolution of important gene families, here tubulins. Tubulins are a family of eukaryotic structural genes that form microtubules, fundamental components of the cytoskeleton that media...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-10-113
更新日期：2010-04-27 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Understanding the evolution of species limits is important in ecology, evolution, and conservation biology. Despite its likely importance in the evolution of these limits, little is known about phenotypic covariance in geographically marginal populations, and the degree to which it constrains, or facilitates...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-13-105
更新日期：2013-05-28 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Complete mitochondrial genome sequences have become important tools for the study of genome architecture, phylogeny, and molecular evolution. Despite the rapid increase in available mitogenomes, the taxonomic sampling often poorly reflects phylogenetic diversity and is often also biased to represent deeper (...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-10-300
更新日期：2010-10-07 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Prions are transmissible, propagating alternative states of proteins, and are usually made from the fibrillar, beta-sheet-rich assemblies termed amyloid. Prions in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae propagate heritable phenotypes, uncover hidden genetic variation, function in large-scale gene regulat...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/s12862-016-0594-3
更新日期：2016-01-25 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:The composition and expression of vertebrate gene families is shaped by species specific gene loss in combination with a number of gene and genome duplication events (R1, R2 in all vertebrates, R3 in teleosts) and depends on the ecological and evolutionary context. In this study we analyzed the evolutionary ...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-10-117
更新日期：2010-04-29 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Chaetognaths, or arrow worms, are small marine, bilaterally symmetrical metazoans. The objective of this study was to analyse ribosomal protein (RP) coding sequences from a published collection of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from a chaetognath (Spadella cephaloptera) and to use them in phylogenetic studie...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-7-146
更新日期：2007-08-28 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:The evolutionary history of a species is frequently derived from molecular sequences, and the resulting phylogenetic trees do not include explicit functional information. Here, we aimed to assess the functional relationships among bacteria in the Spirochaetes phylum, based on the biological processes of 42,4...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/s12862-019-1379-2
更新日期：2019-02-13 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Sex differences in lifespan are ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom but the causes underlying this phenomenon remain poorly understood. Several explanations based on asymmetrical inheritance patterns (sex chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA) have been proposed, but these ideas have rarely been tested exper...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-9-33
更新日期：2009-02-06 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Orb-web weaving spiders and their relatives use multiple types of task-specific silks. The majority of spider silk studies have focused on the ultra-tough dragline silk synthesized in major ampullate glands, but other silk types have impressive material properties. For instance, minor ampullate silks of orb-...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/s12862-017-0927-x
更新日期：2017-03-14 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Bacterial global regulators each regulate the expression of several hundred genes. In Escherichia coli, the top seven global regulators together control over half of all genes. Leucine-responsive regulatory protein (Lrp) is one of these top seven global regulators. Lrp orthologs are very widely distributed, ...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/s12862-016-0685-1
更新日期：2016-05-20 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:The Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa) is a small unisexual fish that has been suspected of being threatened by extinction from the stochastic accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations that is caused by Muller's ratchet in non-recombining populations. However, no detailed quantification of the extent of th...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-8-88
更新日期：2008-03-19 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Previous phylogenetic analyses of African elephants have included limited numbers of forest elephant samples. A large-scale assessment of mitochondrial DNA diversity in forest elephant populations here reveals a more complex evolutionary history in African elephants as a whole than two-taxon models assume. ...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-7-244
更新日期：2007-12-19 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:The White Spot Syndrome Virus (WSSV) is an important pathogen that infects a variety of decapod species and causes a highly contagious disease in penaeid shrimps. Mass mortalities caused by WSSV have pronounced commercial impact on shrimp aquaculture. Until now WSSV is the only known member of the virus fami...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/s12862-015-0380-7
更新日期：2015-07-19 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Dung beetles (subfamily Scarabaeinae) are popular model organisms in ecology and developmental biology, and for the last two decades they have experienced a systematics renaissance with the adoption of modern phylogenetic approaches. Within this period 16 key phylogenies and numerous additional studies with ...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/s12862-016-0822-x
更新日期：2016-11-29 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Despite the common assumption that multiple mating should in general be favored in males, but not in females, to date there is no consensus on the general impact of multiple mating on female fitness. Notably, very little is known about the genetic and physiological features underlying the female response to ...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/s12862-014-0239-3
更新日期：2014-11-19 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:DNA sequences afford access to the evolutionary pathways of life. Particularly mobile elements that constantly co-evolve in genomes encrypt recent and ancient information of their host's history. In mammals there is an extraordinarily abundant activity of mobile elements that occurs in a dynamic succession o...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-10-376
更新日期：2010-12-02 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Zona pellucida domain-containing proteins (ZP proteins) have been identified as the principle constituents of the egg coat (EC) of diverse metazoan taxa, including jawed vertebrates, urochordates and molluscs that span hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary divergence. Although ZP proteins generally c...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-12-239
更新日期：2012-12-08 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:The right sampling of homologous sequences for phylogenetic or molecular evolution analyses is a crucial step, the quality of which can have a significant impact on the final interpretation of the study. There is no single way for constructing datasets suitable for phylogenetic analysis, because this task in...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-10-8
更新日期：2010-01-12 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Unlike northern Europe and most of northern North America, the Eastern Palearctic and the northwesternmost tip of North America are believed to have been almost unglaciated during the Quarternary glacial periods. This could have facilitated long-term survival of many organisms in that area. To evaluate this,...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-10-35
更新日期：2010-02-04 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:Myzostomids are marine annelids, nearly all of which live symbiotically on or inside echinoderms, chiefly crinoids, and to a lesser extent asteroids and ophiuroids. These symbionts possess a variety of adult body plans and lifestyles. Most described species live freely on the exterior of their hosts as adult...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/s12862-014-0170-7
更新日期：2014-08-28 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:The currently recognized species richness of South American salamanders is surprisingly low compared to North and Central America. In part, this low richness may be due to the salamanders being a recent arrival to South America. Additionally, the number of South American salamander species may be underestima...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-13-59
更新日期：2013-03-04 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:A widely-used approach for screening nuclear DNA markers is to obtain sequence data and use bioinformatic algorithms to estimate which two alleles are present in heterozygous individuals. It is common practice to omit unresolved genotypes from downstream analyses, but the implications of this have not been i...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-10-118
更新日期：2010-04-30 00:00:00
abstract：BACKGROUND:The population genetic structure of a parasite, and consequently its ability to adapt to a given host, is strongly linked to its own life history as well as the life history of its host. While the effects of parasite life history on their population genetic structure have received some attention, the effect ...
journal_title：BMC evolutionary biology
pub_type： 杂志文章
doi：10.1186/1471-2148-14-18
更新日期：2014-01-30 00:00:00
