Sexually Antagonistic Selection and Evolution of the Genome

Females and males differ in a vast number of ways. These differences result from sexually antagonistic selection (SAS), in which an allele is beneficial to one sex but detrimental to the other. Although it is important, for example mediate disease in humans and generating sexual dimorphism in animals and plants, we know relatively little about SAS because conventional methods cannot be used to study it. I will discuss how SAS may cause sex chromosomes to cease recombination, and establish new sex determination systems. We find that different kinds of sex determination systems affect adult sex ratios, and SAS is one mechanism that may be the cause. We show that, across the eukaryotes, patterns of crossing over during meiosis differ between the sexes in consistent ways. Again, SAS is a possible explanation. Detecting SAS acting on autosomes is difficult because the signals of selection are erased each generation. We therefore study SAS “in real time” by search for allele frequency differences between the sexes. We find evidence of SAS acting on very many genes scattered across the human genome.

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