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      Sex releases the speed limit on evolution.

      Nature
      Adaptation, Physiological, Animals, Biological Evolution, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, cytology, genetics, physiology, Clone Cells, Epistasis, Genetic, Population Density, Selection, Genetic, Sex, Stochastic Processes, Time Factors

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          Abstract

          Explaining the evolutionary maintenance of sex remains a key problem in evolutionary biology. One potential benefit of sex is that it may allow a more rapid adaptive response when environmental conditions change, by increasing the efficiency with which selection can fix beneficial mutations. Here I show that sex can increase the rate of adaptation in the facultatively sexual single-celled chlorophyte Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, but that the benefits of sex depend crucially on the size of the population that is adapting: sex has a marked effect in large populations but little effect in small populations. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the benefits of sex in a novel environment, including stochastic effects in small populations, clonal interference and epistasis between beneficial alleles. These results indicate that clonal interference is important in this system.

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