Selfish Mitochondrial DNA Proliferates and Diversifies in Small, but not Large, Experimental Populations of Caenorhabditis briggsae.

ABSTRACT: Evolutionary interactions across levels of biological organization contribute to a variety of fundamental processes including genome evolution, reproductive mode transitions, species diversification, and extinction. Evolutionary theory predicts that so-called "selfish" genetic elements will proliferate when the host effective population size (Ne) is small, but direct tests of this prediction remain few. We analyzed the evolutionary dynamics of deletion-containing mitochondrial DNA (ΔmtDNA) molecules, previously characterized as selfish elements, in six different natural strains of the nematode Caenorhabditis briggsae allowed to undergo experimental evolution in a range of population sizes (N = 1, 10, 100, and 1,000) for a maximum of 50 generations. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was analyzed fo

SUBMITTER: Phillips WS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4524483 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature