Virgin Birth: A genetic basis for facultative parthenogenesis
Abstract
Sexual reproduction evolved 1-2 billion years ago and underlies the biodiversity of our planet. Nevertheless, devolution of sexual into asexual reproduction can occur across all phyla of the animal kingdom. The genetic basis for how parthenogenesis can arise is completely unknown. To understand the mechanism and benefits of parthenogenesis, we have sequenced the genome of the facultative parthenogen, Drosophila mercatorum, and compared its organisation and expression pattern during parthenogenetic or sexual reproduction. We identified three genes, desat2, Myc, and polo in parthenogenetic D. mercatorum that when mis-regulated in a non-parthenogenetic species, D. melanogaster, enable facultative parthenogenetic reproduction. This simple genetic switch leads us to propose that sporadic facultative parthenogenesis could evolve as an 'escape route' preserving the genetic lineage in the face of sexual isolation.
Additional Information
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Version 1: March 14, 2022; Version 2: May 18, 2022. We would like to thank Isabel Palacios, John Welch, and Sally Otto for reading the manuscript and scientific discussions. We would like to thank Richard Durbin for advice, discussions, and computation assistance and Frank Jiggens for advice and discussions. We would like to thank Jonathan Day (Frank Jiggens' Lab) and Bettina Fischer (Richard Durbin's Lab) for advice on library preparation, technical assistance, protocols, reagents, and endless patience. We would like to thank Harry Choi and Mike Liu, from Molecular Instruments for troubleshooting and for gifted reagents that were during the optimisation of the HCR FISH protocol for use on DNA. We would like to thank Paula Almeida-Coelho for technical advice on in situs and karyotyping. We would like to thank Frank Sprenger for flies, kindly brought to Cambridge. Finally, we would like to thank the Genetics Fly Facility for embryo injections, particularly Dr Alla Madich for multiple attempts at developing transgenics in D. mercatorum. Funding: We gratefully acknowledge support from Leverhulme Trust Project Grant RPG-2018-229, (ALB, DKF and DMG). We gratefully acknowledge support from NIH/NIDA U01DA047638 (EG) and NIH/NIGMS R01GM123489 (EG). Authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All raw and analyzed D. mercatorum genomic and transcriptomic data generated by this study will be provided on public databases, all code used for analysis in on GitHub via FabianDK and ekg, all Drosophila strains/stocks will be offered to Bloomington Stock Centre or made available upon request.Attached Files
Submitted - 2022.03.13.484157v2.full.pdf
Supplemental Material - media-1.pdf
Supplemental Material - media-10.xlsx
Supplemental Material - media-2.pdf
Supplemental Material - media-3.xlsx
Supplemental Material - media-4.xlsx
Supplemental Material - media-5.xlsx
Supplemental Material - media-6.xlsx
Supplemental Material - media-7.xlsx
Supplemental Material - media-8.xlsx
Supplemental Material - media-9.xlsx
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 113927
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20220315-626490000
- Leverhulme Trust
- RPG-2018-229
- NIH
- U01DA047638
- NIH
- R01GM123489
- Created
-
2022-03-16Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2022-05-24Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Division of Biology and Biological Engineering (BBE)