Fitness differences suppress the number of mating types in evolving isogamous species

Yvonne Krumbeck; George Constable; Tim Rogers

doi:10.1098/rsos.192126

Fitness differences suppress the number of mating types in evolving isogamous species

Yvonne Krumbeck, George Constable, Tim Rogers

University of York

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

7 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

Sexual reproduction is not always synonymous with the existence of two morphologically different sexes; isogamous species produce sex cells of equal size, typically falling into multiple distinct self-incompatible classes, termed mating types. A long-standing open question in evolutionary biology is: what governs the number of these mating types across species? Simple theoretical arguments imply an advantage to rare types, suggesting the number of types should grow consistently; however, empirical observations are very different. While some isogamous species exhibit thousands of mating types, such species are exceedingly rare, and most have fewer than 10. In this paper, we present a mathematical analysis to quantify the role of fitness variation—characterized by different mortality rates—in determining the number of mating types emerging in simple evolutionary models. We predict that the number of mating types decreases as the variance of mortality increases.

Original language	English
Article number	192126
Journal	Royal Society Open Science
Volume	7
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.192126
Publication status	Published - 1 Feb 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Data accessibility. Data and relevant code for this research work are stored in GitHub: https://github.com/ YvonneKrumbeck/Mating-Type-Model and have been archived within the Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10. 5281/zenodo.3631274. Authors’ contributions. Y.K. undertook the mathematical analysis, performed all simulations and drafted the manuscript. G.W.A.C. and T.R. conceived and supervised the study, participated in analysis and critically revised the manuscript. Competing interests. We declare we have no competing interests. Funding. T.R. and Y.K. are supported by the Royal Society. G.W.A.C. is supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Acknowledgements. T.R. and Y.K. gratefully acknowledge the support of the Royal Society. G.W.A.C. thanks Leverhulme Trust for support through the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

Keywords

Balancing selection
Isogamy
Mating types
Negative frequency-dependent selection
Self-incompatibility

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General

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10.1098/rsos.192126Licence: CC BY

https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.07117

Cite this

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title = "Fitness differences suppress the number of mating types in evolving isogamous species",

abstract = "Sexual reproduction is not always synonymous with the existence of two morphologically different sexes; isogamous species produce sex cells of equal size, typically falling into multiple distinct self-incompatible classes, termed mating types. A long-standing open question in evolutionary biology is: what governs the number of these mating types across species? Simple theoretical arguments imply an advantage to rare types, suggesting the number of types should grow consistently; however, empirical observations are very different. While some isogamous species exhibit thousands of mating types, such species are exceedingly rare, and most have fewer than 10. In this paper, we present a mathematical analysis to quantify the role of fitness variation—characterized by different mortality rates—in determining the number of mating types emerging in simple evolutionary models. We predict that the number of mating types decreases as the variance of mortality increases.",

keywords = "Balancing selection, Isogamy, Mating types, Negative frequency-dependent selection, Self-incompatibility",

author = "Yvonne Krumbeck and George Constable and Tim Rogers",

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Fitness differences suppress the number of mating types in evolving isogamous species

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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