An Empirical Approach to Understanding the Relationship Between Recombination and Fitness

• Main Author: Tedman-Aucoin, Katherine
• Other Authors: Agrawal, Aneil
• Format: Others
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: fitness; recombination; coincidence; Drosophila melanogaster; evolution of sex; 0369
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/17230

The persistence of sex is a recurrent conundrum in evolutionary biology because sex is costly. These costs may be accounted for by looking at the outcome of sex, namely that sex causes genetic mixing. Recombination is one of the processes by which sex causes genetic mixing; determining when recombination is advantageous may alleviate some of the costs of sex. The advantages of recombination are in the effects of recombination and the influences thereupon. The first experiment focuses on the effects of recombination on the mean fitness and variance in fitness. A second experiment examines the influences on recombination by addressing whether recombination is a general response to poor condition. Specifically, the impact on recombination rate of genotypes with variable fitness is investigated. Differing fitness effects are not correlated to recombination rates. Conversely, coincidence, a recombination related trait, is positively correlated with fitness.