Can paternal leakage maintain sexually antagonistic polymorphism in the cytoplasm?
Kuijper, B; Lane, N; Pomiankowski, A
Date: 1 February 2015
Article
Journal
Journal of Evolutionary Biology
Publisher
Wiley
Publisher DOI
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Abstract
A growing number of studies in multicellular organisms highlight low or
moderate frequencies of paternal transmission of cytoplasmic organelles,
including both mitochondria and chloroplasts. It is well established that
strict maternal inheritance is selectively blind to cytoplasmic elements that
are deleterious to males – ’mother’s ...
A growing number of studies in multicellular organisms highlight low or
moderate frequencies of paternal transmission of cytoplasmic organelles,
including both mitochondria and chloroplasts. It is well established that
strict maternal inheritance is selectively blind to cytoplasmic elements that
are deleterious to males – ’mother’s curse’. But it is not known how sensitive
this conclusion is to slight levels of paternal cytoplasmic leakage. We
assess the scope for polymorphism when individuals bear multiple cytoplasmic
alleles in the presence of paternal leakage, bottlenecks and recurrent
mutation. When fitness interactions among cytoplasmic elements within an
individual are additive, we find that sexually antagonistic polymorphism is
restricted to cases of strong selection on males. However, when fitness interactions
among cytoplasmic elements are nonlinear, much more extensive
polymorphism can be supported in the cytoplasm. In particular, mitochondrial
mutants that have strong beneficial fitness effects in males and weak
deleterious fitness effects in females when rare (i.e. ’reverse dominance’)
are strongly favoured under paternal leakage. We discuss how such epistasis
could arise through preferential segregation of mitochondria in sex-specific
somatic tissues. Our analysis shows how paternal leakage can dampen the
evolution of deleterious male effects associated with predominant maternal
inheritance of cytoplasm, potentially explaining why ’mother’s curse’ is less
pervasive than predicted by earlier work.
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