Department of Philosophy and Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Bioessays. 2021 May;43(5):e2100009. doi: 10.1002/bies.202100009. Epub 2021 Mar 17.
"Selfish" gene theories have offered invaluable insight into eukaryotic genome evolution, but they can also be misleading. The "selfish mitochondrion" hypothesis, developed in the 90s explained uniparental organelle inheritance as a mechanism of conflict resolution, improving cooperation between genetically distinct compartments of the cell. But modern population genetic models provided a more general explanation for uniparental inheritance based on mutational variance redistribution, modulating the efficiency of both purifying and adaptive selection. Nevertheless, as reviewed here, "selfish" conflict theories still dominate the literature. While these hypotheses are rich in metaphor and highly intuitive, selective focus on only one type of mitochondrial mutation limits the generality of our understanding and hinders progress in mito-nuclear evolution theory. Recognizing that uniparental inheritance may have evolved-and is maintained across the eukaryotic tree of life-because of its influence on mutational variance and improved selection will only increase the generality of our evolutionary reasoning, retaining "selfish" conflict explanations as a special case of a much broader theory.
“自私”基因理论为真核生物基因组进化提供了宝贵的见解，但它们也可能具有误导性。20 世纪 90 年代提出的“自私线粒体”假说将单亲细胞器遗传解释为一种解决冲突的机制，从而提高了细胞内遗传上不同隔间之间的合作。但是，现代群体遗传模型基于突变方差再分配为单亲遗传提供了更普遍的解释，从而调节了净化和适应性选择的效率。然而，正如本文所综述的，“自私”冲突理论仍然占据主导地位。虽然这些假说富有隐喻且极具直观性，但选择性地仅关注一种类型的线粒体突变限制了我们理解的普遍性，并阻碍了线粒体-核进化理论的发展。认识到单亲遗传可能是因为其对突变方差和改进选择的影响而进化并在真核生物进化树上得以维持，这只会增加我们进化推理的普遍性，将“自私”冲突解释保留为更广泛理论的一个特例。
