Abstract
Recombination, the process by which DNA strands are broken and repaired, producing new combinations of alleles, occurs in nearly all multicellular organisms and has important implications for many evolutionary processes. The effects of recombination can be good, as it can facilitate adaptation, but also bad when it breaks apart beneficial combinations of alleles, and recombination is highly variable between taxa, species, individuals and across the genome. Understanding how and why recombination rate varies is a major challenge in biology. Most theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to understanding the role of recombination in the evolution of sex—comparing between sexual and asexual species or populations. How recombination rate evolves and what impact this has on evolutionary processes within sexually reproducing organisms has received much less attention. This Theme Issue focusses on how and why recombination rate varies in sexual species, and aims to coalesce knowledge of the molecular mechanisms governing recombination with our understanding of the evolutionary processes driving variation in recombination within and between species. By integrating these fields, we can identify important knowledge gaps and areas for future research, and pave the way for a more comprehensive understanding of how and why recombination rate varies.
Highlights
Cite this article: Stapley J, Feulner PGD, Johnston SE, Santure AW, Smadja CM. 2017 Recombination: the good, the bad and the variable
Ongoing advances in DNA sequencing technology and methods to estimate recombination from population-based samples are providing much needed empirical evidence of ‘How’ recombination varies, our understanding of ‘Why’ it varies is progressing more slowly. When considering this question: ‘Why does recombination rate vary?’, there is much focus on the evolutionary advantage of sex, but much less attention given to understanding why recombination varies between sexually reproducing & 2017 The Authors
As a group of evolutionary biologists who have observed variation in recombination rate in sexually reproducing organisms—we considered this an important knowledge gap. We proposed this special issue ‘Evolutionary causes and consequences of recombination rate variation in sexual organisms’ with the aim to bring this question to the fore and to encourage more researchers to investigate if and how recombination rate varies, whether it responds to natural or sexual selection, and how it influences fundamental evolutionary processes within sexually reproducing organisms, such as adaptation and speciation
Summary
Cite this article: Stapley J, Feulner PGD, Johnston SE, Santure AW, Smadja CM. 2017 Recombination: the good, the bad and the variable. This Theme Issue focusses on how and why recombination rate varies in sexual species, and aims to coalesce knowledge of the molecular mechanisms governing recombination with our understanding of the evolutionary processes driving variation in recombination within and between species.
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More From: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
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