Sex-biased demography modulates male harm across the genome
Abstract
Recent years have seen an explosion of theoretical and empirical interest in the role that kin selection plays in shaping patterns of sexual conflict, with a particular focus on male harming traits. However, this work has focused solely on autosomal genes, and as such it remains unclear how demography modulates the evolution of male harm loci occurring in other portions of the genome, such as sex chromosomes and cytoplasmic elements. To investigate this, we extend existing models of sexual conflict for application to these different modes of inheritance. We first analyse the general case, revealing how sex-specific relatedness, reproductive value and the intensity of local competition combine to determine the potential for male harm. We then analyse a series of demographically explicit models, to assess how dispersal, overlapping generations, reproductive skew and the mechanism of population regulation affect sexual conflict across the genome, and drive conflict between nuclear and cytoplasmic genes. We then explore the effects of sex biases in these demographic parameters, showing how they may drive further conflicts between autosomes and sex chromosomes. Finally, we outline how different crossing schemes may be used to identify signatures of these intragenomic conflicts.
Citation
Hitchcock , T & Gardner , A 2021 , ' Sex-biased demography modulates male harm across the genome ' , Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences , vol. 288 , no. 1965 , 20212237 . https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.2237
Publication
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0962-8452Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Description
Funding: T.J.H. is supported by a PhD scholarship funded by the School of Biology, University of St Andrews. A.G. is supported by a Natural Environment Research Council Independent Research Fellowship (grant no. NE/K009524/1) and a European Research Council Consolidator (grant no. 771387).Collections
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