Thursday, January 10, 2013

Lab meeting Tuesday January 15th: Linking assortative mating, fitness and sexually antagonistic genetic variation


Posted by Anna Nordén

For the lab meeting next week I thought we could read an interesting article about how assortative mating by fitness effects sexually antagonistic genetic variation. Although it is a modelling paper, and quite theoretical, it is fairly short and I hope most of you have time to read it. You can find it here. In addition, John will show some of his work in the program MARK on damselfly survival data, how fitness is linked to morphology. Hopefully I will also show some results on the strength of assortative mating for different morphological traits in Calopteryx splendens and C. virgo damselflies. I will bring fika. Hope to see you there!

Time and place as usual: Argumentet (2nd floor, Ecology Building) at 10.30

Title: ASSORTATIVE MATING BY FITNESS AND SEXUALLY ANTAGONISTIC GENETIC VARIATION

Author: Göran Arnqvist
Abstract: Recent documentations of sexually antagonistic genetic variation in fitness have spurred an interest in the mechanisms that may act to maintain such variation in natural populations. Using individual-based simulations, I show that positive assortative mating by fitness increases the amount of sexually antagonistic genetic variance in fitness, primarily by elevating the equilibrium frequency of heterozygotes, over most of the range of sex-specific selection and dominance. Further, although the effects of assortative mating by fitness on the protection conditions of polymorphism in sexually antagonistic loci were relatively minor, it widens the protection conditions under most reasonable scenarios (e. g., under heterozygote superiority when fitness is averaged across the sexes) but can also somewhat narrow the protection conditions under other circumstances. The near-ubiquity of assortative mating in nature suggests that it may contribute to upholding standing sexually antagonistic genetic variation in fitness.

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