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The Phenomenon Of Reproductive Parasitism And Its Evolutionary Implications

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The Phenomenon of Reproductive Parasitism and its Evolutionary Implications.

Marcelo Vieira da Silva

Genetics and Evolution – BIO372
Professors Kate Bryant and Jennie Chaplin
October 16, 2014 Evolutionary biology is a branch of biology that investigates the evolution of organism, especially in the areas of molecular and microbial evolution, behavior, genetics, ecology, life histories, development, paleontology, systematics, and morphology. In this essay I am going to discuss about how microorganism may affect their hosts from the phenomenon of reproductive parasitism, and explain its evolutionary implications.
The first step is defining the process of symbiosis and what are the possible associations between living …show more content…

Disrupting the mode of sex determination of their hosts could be advantageous for endosymbionts because they are predominantly transmitted vertically through the female egg cytoplasm, and not via male sperm (Courdax, 2011). From this perspective, male hosts do not offer advantages to the production or survival of endosymbionts, for this reason males are known as dead-end to the success of reproductive parasites. However, some endosymbionts have developed mechanisms to get over this barrier, assuming host’s reproductive mechanisms to their own benefits. Many endosymbionts can induce reproductive manipulations such as, feminization of genetic males, male-killing, parthenogenesis in females, and cytoplasmic incompatibility (Engelstaedter, 2006).
Because of their nature, reproductive parasites are very common. The most commonly known species is alpha proteobacteria, Wolbachia. However, there are several endosymbionts of arthropods such as, Cardinium, Rickttesia, Spiroplasma, Flavobacteria and Arsenophonus, that also have evolved such a selfish evolutionary strategy consisting of manipulating their host reproduction as demonstrated on table 1 below. From this perspective we can assume that Wolbachia is the most successful endosymbionts by its numerous mains of reproductive manipulation mechanisms of their

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