Unreduced gametes: meiotic mishap or evolutionary mechanism?

•The ability to produce unreduced gametes facilitates polyploid speciation.•Unreduced gamete production is under genetic control.•Stress and interspecific hybridisation increase unreduced gamete production.•Unreduced gamete production may comprise an evolutionary mechanism for speciation. Unreduced...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Trends in genetics Vol. 31; no. 1; pp. 5 - 10
Main Authors: Mason, Annaliese S., Pires, J. Chris
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01.01.2015
Subjects:
Biological Evolution
Genetic Variation
Germ Cells - metabolism
hybrid speciation
Inheritance Patterns - genetics
Medical Education
Meiosis
Polyploidy
unreduced gametes
meiosis
polyploidy
hybrid speciation
unreduced gametes
ISSN:0168-9525
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:•The ability to produce unreduced gametes facilitates polyploid speciation.•Unreduced gamete production is under genetic control.•Stress and interspecific hybridisation increase unreduced gamete production.•Unreduced gamete production may comprise an evolutionary mechanism for speciation. Unreduced gametes (gametes with the somatic chromosome number) are known to facilitate polyploid formation. Unreduced gametes result from a plethora of different mechanisms across different taxa, suggesting that the ability to produce unreduced gametes has evolutionary utility. Heritable genetic variation for unreduced gamete production has been observed, thereby providing an evolutionary substrate. Unreduced gametes are also frequently involved in interspecific hybridisation events as well as being produced by interspecific hybrids, facilitating allopolyploidisation. Environmental stress often triggers unreduced gamete production, suggesting that unreduced gametes may facilitate polyploid speciation in response to changing environments. Thus, although unreduced gamete formation may be a meiotic mishap, we suggest that unreduced gametes can be more explicitly considered as a mechanism for evolutionary speciation that should be measured and tested across and within lineages for exaptive evolution (a feature with evolutionary utility that has not arisen under conventional selective pressure) and evolvability (the capacity to generate adaptive genetic variation).
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ISSN:0168-9525
DOI:10.1016/j.tig.2014.09.011