News

Facultative sex should allow normally asexual lineages to gain from the advantages of sex – so what happens if you allow asexual lineages to mate?

In our new preprint (led by Becky Boulton) we used the sexually polymorphic aphid parasitoid wasp Lysiphlebus fabarum to test this and found that mothers produce a mixed brood of sexually and asexually produced offspring, and the sexually produced offspring appear to suffer reduced fecundity.

This suggests facultative sex actually results in costs that may help to explain why facultative sex is rare in nature.

Thanks to all involved! <3

Photo credit: Bart Zijlstra

Our new paper has now been published in PNAS!

We use rarely produced parthenogenetic males to examine what happens to dosage compensation when it is no longer needed (e.g. in parthenogenetic species).

Surprisingly, we find dosage compensation is maintained in our parthenogenetic stick insects even in the absence of selection for it!

This suggests dosage compensation mechanisms are either weakly selected against or evolutionarily constrained.

Congrats to all involved!

Edit: Covered by the BBC!

Our new preprint lead by Jeli is now out!

We find evidence of unresolved sexual antagonism in early development, suggesting that focusing solely on adult gene expression will lead to an underestimate of the prevalence of unresolved sexual antagonism.

Congrats to all involved!

Liv has joined the lab as an MScRes student (co-supervised with Lovesha Sivanantharajah) to investigate tau-toxicity modifiers!

Isobelle has joined the lab as an MScRes student (co-supervised with John Mulley) to investigate the Treborth long-term moth dataset!

Our new preprint is out!

We use rarely produced parthenogenetic males to examine what happens to dosage compensation when it is no longer needed (e.g. in parthenogenetic species).

Surprisingly, we find dosage compensation is maintained in our parthenogenetic stick insects even in the absence of selection for it!

This suggests dosage compensation mechanisms are either weakly selected against or evolutionarily constrained.

Congrats to all involved!

Jeli’s developmental dosage compensation paper is now out in PLoS Genetics!

Congrats to all involved! <3

Isabella has joined the lab as an undergraduate intern to design some insect behaviour recording equipment.