Hill, M; Reuter, M; Stewart, A; (2019) Sexual antagonism drives the displacement of polymorphism across gene regulatory cascades. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , 286 (1904) , Article 20190660. 10.1098/rspb.2019.0660.

Preview	Text (Article) Reuter_Antagonism_2nd_Revision.pdf - Accepted Version Download (1MB) | Preview
Preview	Text (Supplementary Material) Reuter_Hill_et_al_ESM.pdf - Accepted Version Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Males and females have different reproductive roles and are often subject to contrasting selection pressures. This sexual antagonism can lead, at a given locus, to different alleles being favoured in each sex and, consequently, to genetic variation being maintained in a population. Although the presence of sexually antagonistic (SA) polymorphisms has been documented across a range of species, their evolutionary dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we study SA selection on gene expression, which is fundamental to sexual dimorphism, via the evolution of regulatory binding sites. We show that for sites longer than 1 nucleotide, expression polymorphism is maintained only when intermediate expression levels are deleterious to both sexes. We then show that, in a regulatory cascade, expression polymorphism tends to become displaced over evolutionary time from the target of SA selection to upstream regulators. Our results have consequences for understanding the evolution of sexual dimorphism, and provide specific empirical predictions for the regulatory architecture of genes under SA selection.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONCSVXML

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Archive Staff Only

View Item