Abstract
The history of life has been driven by evolutionary transitions in individuality, that is, the aggregation of autonomous individuals to form a new, higher-level individual. The fungus Neurospora te ...
Highlights
The history of life is characterized by evolutionary transitions in individuality
Nuclear Ratio Is Homogeneous in Sectors of Heterokaryotic Mycelium of Neurospora tetrasperma When comparing the variance of nuclear ratios among sectors of a given mycelium with the technical variance obtained in quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) estimations
F), we found that the mean sector variance did not differ significantly from the mean technical variance
Summary
The history of life is characterized by evolutionary transitions in individuality. Such transitions involve independently replicating individuals that aggregate to form new, higher-level individuals (Buss 1987; Maynard-Smith and Szathmary 1995; West et al 2015). We use the filamentous ascomycete Neurospora tetrasperma as a model for the study of multilevel selection This species has recently (approximately 1 mya) evolved a mating system in which matingtype heterokaryosis is dominant throughout the life cycle. In N. tetrasperma, haploid nuclei of opposite mating types, mat A and mat a, coexist throughout the life cycle. They are packaged into the ascospores (sexual spores) in a 1∶1 proportion, enabling the individual to complete the life cycle by selfing The sequence divergence of nuclei of the two alternative mating types is up to 3.2% (Merino et al 1996; Ellison et al 2011; Corcoran et al 2016) as a result of both mutation accumulation and, in certain lineages, introgression from closely related species (Sun et al 2012; Corcoran et al 2016)
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