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Curr Opin Microbiol. 2011 Dec;14(6):634-41. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2011.10.005. Epub 2011 Oct 27.
Sexual reproduction in Volvocine algae coevolved with the acquisition of multicellularity. Unicellular genera such as Chlamydomonas and small colonial genera from this group have classical mating types with equal-sized gametes, while larger multicellular genera such as Volvox have differentiated males and females that produce sperm and eggs respectively. Newly available sequence from the Volvox and Chlamydomonas genomes and mating loci open up the potential to investigate how sex-determining regions co-evolve with major changes in development and sexual reproduction. The expanded size and sequence divergence between the male and female haplotypes of the Volvox mating locus (MT) not only provide insights into how the colonial Volvocine algae might have evolved sexual dimorphism, but also raise questions about why the putative ancestral-like MT locus in Chlamydomonas shows less divergence between haplotypes than expected.
绿藻中的有性生殖与多细胞生物的获得共同进化。像衣藻这样的单细胞属和来自这个群体的小群体属具有具有相同大小配子的经典交配型，而像水螅虫这样较大的多细胞属则具有分化的雄性和雌性，分别产生精子和卵子。来自水螅虫和衣藻基因组和交配基因座的新序列为研究性别决定区域如何与发育和有性生殖的重大变化共同进化提供了潜力。水螅虫交配基因座（MT）的雄性和雌性单倍型之间的扩展大小和序列差异不仅提供了关于绿藻群体如何进化出性二态性的见解，也提出了关于为什么在衣藻中，假定的类似祖先的 MT 基因座的单倍型之间的差异比预期的要小的问题。
