Diploidy and the selective advantage for sexual reproduction in unicellular organisms

TL;DR

This paper presents mathematical models showing that sexual reproduction provides a selective advantage in diploid unicellular organisms, especially under certain genome organizations and mutation rates, by maintaining higher mean fitness compared to asexual strategies.

Contribution

It introduces new mathematical models demonstrating the advantage of sexual reproduction in diploid unicellular organisms with different genome organizations, under broader assumptions than previous studies.

Findings

Sexual reproduction with multi-chromosomed genomes has higher mean fitness.

Other strategies lose viability due to mutation accumulation beyond a threshold.

Sexual pathway avoids fitness decline despite high mutation rates.

Abstract

This paper develops mathematical models describing the evolutionary dynamics of both asexually and sexually reproducing populations of diploid unicellular organisms. We consider two forms of genome organization. In one case, we assume that the genome consists of two multi-gene chromosomes, while in the second case we assume that each gene defines a separate chromosome. If the organism has $ l $ homologous pairs that lack a functional copy of the given gene, then the fitness of the organism is $ \kappa_l $. The $ \kappa_l $ are assumed to be monotonically decreasing, so that $ \kappa_0 = 1 > \kappa_1 > \kappa_2 > ... > \kappa_{\infty} = 0 $. For nearly all of the reproduction strategies we consider, we find, in the limit of large $ N $, that the mean fitness at mutation-selection balance is $ \max\{2 e^{-\mu} - 1, 0\} $, where $ N $ is the number of genes in the haploid set of the genome, $ \epsilon $ is the probability that a given DNA template strand of a given gene produces a mutated daughter during replication, and $ \mu = N \epsilon $. The only exception is the sexual reproduction pathway for the multi-chromosomed genome. Assuming a multiplicative fitness landscape where $ \kappa_l = \alpha^{l} $ for $ \alpha \in (0, 1) $, this strategy is found to have a mean fitness that exceeds the mean fitness of all of the other strategies. Furthermore, while the other reproduction strategies experience a total loss of viability due to the steady accumulation of deleterious mutations once $ \mu $ exceeds $ \ln 2 $, no such transition occurs in the sexual pathway. The results of this paper demonstrate a selective advantage for sexual reproduction with fewer and much less restrictive assumptions than previous work.