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Article Dans Une Revue Sexual Development Année : 2012

Have Sex or Not? Lessons from Bacteria

Résumé

Sex is one of the greatest puzzles in evolutionary biology. A true meiotic process occurs only in eukaryotes, while in bacteria, gene transcription is fragmentary, so asexual reproduction in this case really means clonal reproduction. Sex could stem from a signal that leads to increased reproductive output of all interacting individuals and could be understood as a secondary consequence of primitive metabolic reactions. Meiotic sex evolved in proto-eukaryotes to solve a problem that bacteria did not have, namely a large amount of DNA material, occurring in an archaic step of proto-cell formation and genetic exchanges. Rather than providing selective advantages through reproduction, sex could be thought of as a series of separate events which combines step-by-step some very weak benefits of recombination, meiosis, gametogenesis and syngamy. Copyright (C) 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel

Dates et versions

hal-01021862 , version 1 (09-07-2014)

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Thierry Lodé. Have Sex or Not? Lessons from Bacteria. Sexual Development, 2012, 6 (6), pp.325-328. ⟨10.1159/000342879⟩. ⟨hal-01021862⟩
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