Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2007 Apr 24;104(17):7139-44.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0700034104. Epub 2007 Apr 16.

Reevolution of sexuality breaks Dollo's law

Katja Domes  1 , Roy A Norton, Mark Maraun, Stefan Scheu
Affiliations

Reevolution of sexuality breaks Dollo's law

Katja Domes et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

The dominance of sexual reproduction is still an unresolved enigma in evolutionary biology. Strong advantages of sex have to exist, because only a few parthenogenetic taxa persist over evolutionary timescales. Oribatid mites (Acari) include outstanding exceptions to the rule that parthenogenetically reproducing taxa are of recent origin and doomed to extinction. In addition to the existence of large parthenogenetic clusters in oribatid mites, phylogenetic analyses of this study and model-based reconstruction of ancestral states of reproduction imply that Crotoniidae have reevolved sexuality from parthenogenetic ancestors within one of those clusters. This reversal in reproductive mode is unique in the animal kingdom and violates Dollo's law that complex ancestral states can never be reacquired. The reevolution of sexuality requires that ancestral genes for male production are maintained over evolutionary time. This maintenance likely is true for oribatid mites because spanandric males exist in various species, although mechanisms that enable the storage of genetically ancestral traits are unclear. Our findings present oribatid mites as a unique model system to explore the evolutionary significance of parthenogenetic and sexual reproduction.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Bayesian tree of combined sequences of the ribosomal 18S region, the heat-shock protein 82, and the elongation factor 1 alpha of 30 oribatid mite taxa. Enarthronota are used as outgroup. Numbers at nodes represent posterior probabilities for Bayesian analyses and bootstrap support values for NJ, ML, and MP analyses. Sexual lineages are indicated by boldfaced lines and font; species that likely reevolved sexual reproduction are both boldfaced and underlined.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Cladogram of the Desmonomata on the basis of ML. Ancestral state of nodes is analyzed by ML on the basis of a symmetrical model with equal rates for the loss and regain of sex (a) and MP (b). Filled circles indicate sexual reproduction; open circles indicate parthenogenetic reproduction. Sexual species are in boldface; species that likely reevolved sexual reproduction are both boldfaced and underlined.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Maynard Smith J. The Evolution of Sex. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press; 1978.
    1. Bell G. The Masterpiece of Nature: The Evolution and Genetics of Sexuality. Los Angeles: Univ of California Press; 1982.
    1. Birky CW. Genetics. 1996;144:427–437. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Vrijenhoek RC. In: Advances in Molecular Ecology. Carvalho G, editor. Amsterdam: IOS Press; 1998. pp. 151–172.
    1. Barraclough TG, Birky CW, Burt A. Evolution (Lawrence, Kans) 2003;57:2166–2172. - PubMed

Publication types

Associated data

LinkOut - more resources