1/7 Sexual antagonism arises when males and females face different selection pressures for a trait influenced by shared genes. This is thought to drive balancing selection and maintain genetic polymorphism. We challenge this view in our recent paper : 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/evlett/qrae059 - ThreadSky

charlesmullon.bsky.social • 32 days ago

1/7 Sexual antagonism arises when males and females face different selection pressures for a trait influenced by shared genes. This is thought to drive balancing selection and maintain genetic polymorphism. We challenge this view in our recent paper :

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/evlett/qrae059

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charlesmullon.bsky.social•32 days ago

2/7 Considering continuous traits influenced by multiple alleles or loci, we show that maintaining genetic polymorphism under sexual antagonism is far more restrictive than previously suggested.

charlesmullon.bsky.social•32 days ago

3/7 Sex-specific dominance reversal, thought to be the main driver of sexually antagonistic balancing selection, only arises under strong constraints and does not easily extend to multiple alleles within or between loci.

charlesmullon.bsky.social•32 days ago

4/7 For most regions of the genome, polymorphism only arises under uncharacteristic sex-specific fitness landscapes—requiring strong, symmetric conflict and accelerating fitness functions in both sexes. We found no evidence for such conditions in available empirical datasets.

charlesmullon.bsky.social•32 days ago

5/7 Except for sites tightly linked to the sex-determining region on sex chromosomes, our results indicate that genetic variation due to sexual antagonism should arise only rarely and often be transient, making these signatures challenging to detect in genomic data using e.g. FST or GWAS approaches.

charlesmullon.bsky.social•32 days ago

6/7 We conclude that sex-specific selection alone is unlikely to maintain genetic variation over long timescales. Persistent sexually antagonistic polymorphism is more likely when traits are controlled by a single large-effect locus with few possible alleles i.e. under strong constraints.

charlesmullon.bsky.social•32 days ago

7/7 Led by @ewanflintham.bsky.social with Vincent Savolainen, @sarperotto.bsky.social and @maxreuter.bsky.social. Thanks @dee-unil.bsky.social, @snsf-ch.bsky.social , and @evolletters.bsky.social for a great reviewing experience.

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