Mother's curse is pervasive across a large mitonuclear Drosophila panel.

ABSTRACT: The maternal inheritance of mitochondrial genomes entails a sex-specific selective sieve, whereby mutations in mitochondrial DNA can only respond to selection acting on females. In theory, this enables male-harming mutations to accumulate in mitochondrial genomes as long as they are neutral, beneficial, or only slightly deleterious to females. Ultimately, this bias could drive the evolution of male-specific mitochondrial mutation loads, an idea known as mother's curse. Earlier work on this hypothesis has mainly used small Drosophila panels, in which naturally sourced mitochondrial genomes were coupled to an isogenic nuclear background. The lack of nuclear genetic variation in these designs has precluded robust generalization. Here, we test the predictions of mother's curse using a l

SUBMITTER: Carnegie L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8190446 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature