Cécile Molinier

The final part of the story: "The arduous path to obligate asexuality in Daphnia" is out in #ProcB 🥳 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article.... 1. Instead of comparing long-established asexuals to sexuals, we generated new asexual lineages to observe the transition in action.

5. This implies that only some lineages overcome the initial fitness valley to become the successful obligate asexuals we later observe in nature. If general, such early fitness valleys during sex–asex transitions may be key to resolving the evolutionary “paradox of sex.”

4. They also showed reduced fertility compared to natural obligate asexuals. This suggests that creating new asexuals by contagion is more complex than previously thought and may result in diverse, non-clonal offspring, on which subsequent selection can act.

The final part of the story: "The arduous path to obligate asexuality in Daphnia" is out in #ProcB 🥳 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article.... 1. Instead of comparing long-established asexuals to sexuals, we generated new asexual lineages to observe the transition in action.

Stay tuned!! More will come soon about the intricate and complicated life cycle of Daphnia 🤭!!!!

Even at very low frequency, rare sex can reduce the long-term costs of asexuality while avoiding most costs of sex. Our results reveal a previously unknown reproductive pathway in Daphnia and suggest that cryptic sex may be more common than previously thought.

Earlier this year, I was pleased that the first part of our work on Daphnia reproductive modes was published in JEB doi.org/10.1093/jeb/vo… In brief, females from so-called obligate parthenogenetic lineages, are in fact able to rarely reproduce sexually. Thread👇

Olfaction written in bones 👃🧠🦴🧬 Thrilled to see our latest study showing that the olfactory bulb endocast is a reliable proxy for mammalian olfaction, now published in @PNASNews pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… Thread 👇

[New Paper] Interested in #olfaction, respiration, and nasal cavities? 👃🧠🐭🐒🐺🦇🐦‍⬛🐍🦎🐊🐸 Check out our review of turbinal bones across tetrapods, now published in Biological Reviews. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

Looking back on 2023, we spotted some cool species in French Guiana and Australia! #herpetology #PostdocLife

@grumpyDrFabre @Dr_DSGreen 😍

[New paper] Mammalian maxilloturbinal evolution does not reflect thermal biology 👃🌡️- 🦥🐭🐪🦭 #CTscan #mammals nature.com/articles/s4146…

Both meiosis disruption and recombination suppression are thus female-limited, which goes against the evolution of OP by disruption of an essential gene for meiosis or recombination in both sexes.  Check out the paper to see alternative hypotheses to explain our findings! 😉

By constructing linkage maps, we find that these asexually produced males show no significant reduction of recombination rates compared to CP males and females.

Interested in the evolution of obligate parthenogenesis (OP) and recombination rates? Check out our new article: academic.oup.com/evolut/article…