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- Title
Meiotic Genes in Colpodean Ciliates Support Secretive Sexuality.
- Authors
Dunthorn, Micah; Zufall, Rebecca A.; Jingyun Chi; Paszkiewicz, Konrad; Moore, Karen; Mahé, Frédéric
- Abstract
The putatively asexual Colpodean ciliates potentially pose a problem to macro-organismic theories of evolution. They are extremely ancient (although asexuality is thought to hasten extinction), and yet there is one apparently derived sexual species (implying an unlikely regain of acomplex trait). If macro-organismic theories of evolution also broadly apply tomicrobial eukaryotes, though, then most or all of the colpodean ciliates should merely be secretively sexual. Here we show using de novo genome sequencing, that colpodean ciliates have themeioticgenes required for sex andthesegenes are under functional constraint. Alongwith thesegenomic data, we argue that these ciliates are sexual given the cytological observations of both micronuclei andmacronucleiwithin their cells, and the behavioral observations of brief fusions as if the cellswere mating. The challenge that colpodean ciliates pose is therefore not to evolutionary theory, but to our ability to induce microbial eukaryotic sex in the laboratory.
- Subjects
EVOLUTIONARY theories; CILIATA; EUKARYOTES; ASEXUAL reproduction; NUCLEOTIDE sequencing
- Publication
Genome Biology & Evolution, 2017, Vol 9, Issue 6, p1781
- ISSN
1759-6653
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/gbe/evx125