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Preparation of the Mgm101 Recombination Protein by MBP-based Tagging Strategy

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Published on: June 25, 2013

Why sex and recombination?

¹Institute of Science and Technology, A-3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria. nick.barton@ist-austria.ac.at

Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology

|November 12, 2009

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Sex and recombination facilitate natural selection by creating genetic variation. Random drift, not just selection, generates negative associations that shield beneficial mutations, impacting adaptation rates.

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Area of Science:

Evolutionary biology
Population genetics

Background:

Sex and recombination are hypothesized to accelerate adaptation by generating favorable genetic variations.
For recombination to aid selection, negative linkage disequilibria (favorable alleles appearing together less than expected) are necessary.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how recombination influences the rate of adaptation.
To determine the maximum possible rate of adaptation under different genomic architectures.

Main Methods:

Theoretical modeling using scaling arguments and two-locus approximations.
Analysis of the impact of linkage and recombination on adaptive substitution rates.

Main Results:

Random drift is a more general source of negative associations than selection, shielding variation from selection.
The rate of adaptation with unlinked loci increases logarithmically with beneficial mutations.
On a linear genome, adaptive rate scales with the inverse of the total recombination rate, limited by interference.

Conclusions:

Negative associations, often generated by random drift, are crucial for recombination to aid adaptation.
High rates of recombination may be favored by selection, particularly in locally adapted populations, but species-wide substitution rates are usually too low to drive this.
The rate of adaptive substitution is fundamentally limited by recombination, especially in large populations with linear genomes.