First lab-meeting this autumn: on the remarkable diversity and evolution of sex determination systems

Posted by Erik Svensson

After field work and summer break it is time to start up this autumn's lab-meetings again. And what could be more interesting than an article about the remarkable diversity and evolution of sex determination systems? A recently published essay in the journal PLoS Biology, summarizes the current knowledge and state-of-the-art of research in this area. It should hopefully be an interesting read. Below, I attach the Abstract and a link to the paper, which is Open Access and downloadable. The figure above give you a taster about the content. Enjoy!

When: Tuesday, August 12 2014, 10.30

Where: "Argumentet", 2nd floor, Ecology Building.


Sex Determination: Why So Many Ways of Doing It? 

Doris Bachtrog Judith E. Mank, Catherine L. Peichel, Mark Kirkpatrick, Sarah P. Otto, Tia-Lynn Ashman, Matthew W. Hahn, Jun Kitano,Itay Mayrose, Ray Ming, Nicolas Perrin, Laura Ross, Nicole Valenzuela, Jana C. Vamosi, The Tree of Sex Consortium 

Published: July 01, 2014DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001899 

Abstract

Sexual reproduction is an ancient feature of life on earth, and the familiar X and Y chromosomes in humans and other model species have led to the impression that sex determination mechanisms are old and conserved. In fact, males and females are determined by diverse mechanisms that evolve rapidly in many taxa. Yet this diversity in primary sex-determining signals is coupled with conserved molecular pathways that trigger male or female development. Conflicting selection on different parts of the genome and on the two sexes may drive many of these transitions, but few systems with rapid turnover of sex determination mechanisms have been rigorously studied. Here we survey our current understanding of how and why sex determination evolves in animals and plants and identify important gaps in our knowledge that present exciting research opportunities to characterize the evolutionary forces and molecular pathways underlying the evolution of sex determination.

Lab-meeting on the evolution of plasticity in changing environments

This Wednesday (January 11 2012), we will discuss a relatively recent theoretical and conceptual paper in PLoS Biology entitled "Adaptation, plasticity and extinction in a changing environment: towards a predictive theory".  You can download it here.


Although this paper was published as recently as in 2010, but has already received 79 citations - a sign of a quite an influential paper. This is not surprising as it connects such topics as climate change, thermal adaptation and niche modelling with the evolution of phenotypic plasticity - all very important and central topics in ecology and evoutionary biology. Below you will find the Abstract for the paper. One of the co-authors is legendary evolutionary quantitative geneticist Russel Lande, by the way.

Time: Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Place: "Argumentet"

 

Summary 

Many species are experiencing sustained environmental change mainly due to human activities. The unusual rate and extent of anthropogenic alterations of the environment may exceed the capacity of developmental, genetic, and demographic mechanisms that populations have evolved to deal with environmental change. To begin to understand the limits to population persistence, we present a simple evolutionary model for the critical rate of environmental change beyond which a population must decline and go extinct. We use this model to highlight the major determinants of extinction risk in a changing environment, and identify research needs for improved predictions based on projected changes in environmental variables. Two key parameters relating the environment to population biology have not yet received sufficient attention. Phenotypic plasticity, the direct influence of environment on the development of individual phenotypes, is increasingly considered an important component of phenotypic change in the wild and should be incorporated in models of population persistence. Environmental sensitivity of selection, the change in the optimum phenotype with the environment, still crucially needs empirical assessment. We use environmental tolerance curves and other examples of ecological and evolutionary responses to climate change to illustrate how these mechanistic approaches can be developed for predictive purposes.