Laboratory of Biology and Modeling of the Cell, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, CNRS UMR 5239, Inserm U1293, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Lyon, France.
Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution, Université Montpellier, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, 34090 Montpellier, France.
Sci Adv. 2023 Aug 25;9(34):eadi2804. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adi2804.
In asexual animals, female meiosis is modified to produce diploid oocytes. If meiosis still involves recombination, this is expected to lead to a rapid loss of heterozygosity, with adverse effects on fitness. Many asexuals, however, have a heterozygous genome, the underlying mechanisms being most often unknown. Cytological and population genomic analyses in the nematode revealed another case of recombining asexual being highly heterozygous genome-wide. We demonstrated that heterozygosity is maintained despite recombination because the recombinant chromatids of each chromosome pair cosegregate during the unique meiotic division. A theoretical model confirmed that this segregation bias is necessary to account for the observed pattern and likely to evolve under a wide range of conditions. Our study uncovers an unexpected type of non-Mendelian genetic inheritance involving cosegregation of recombinant chromatids.
在无性动物中,雌性减数分裂被修改为产生二倍体卵母细胞。如果减数分裂仍然涉及重组,这预计会导致杂合性的迅速丧失,对适应性产生不利影响。然而,许多无性动物具有杂合基因组,其潜在机制通常未知。在线虫中进行的细胞学和群体基因组分析揭示了另一种情况,即重组的无性生殖具有高度的杂合基因组。我们证明,尽管存在重组,但杂合性得以维持,因为每个染色体对的重组染色单体在独特的减数分裂过程中进行共分离。理论模型证实,这种分离偏向是解释观察到的模式所必需的,并且可能在广泛的条件下进化。我们的研究揭示了一种涉及重组染色单体共分离的非孟德尔遗传的意外类型。