Are asymmetric inheritance systems an evolutionary trap? Transitions in the mechanism of genome loss in the scale insect family Eriococcidae
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Haplodiploidy and paternal genome elimination (PGE) are examples of asymmetric inheritance, where males transmit only maternally inherited chromosomes to their offspring. Under haplodiploidy this results from males being haploid, whereas under PGE males inherit but subsequently eliminate paternally inherited chromosomes during meiosis. Their evolution involves changes in the mechanisms of meiosis and sex determination, and sometimes also dosage compensation. As a result, these systems are thought to be an evolutionary trap, meaning that once asymmetric chromosome transmission evolves, it is difficult to transition back to typical Mendelian transmission. We assess whether there is evidence for this idea in the scale insect family Eriococcidae, a lineage with PGE and the only clade with a suggestion that asymmetric inheritance has transitioned back to Mendelian inheritance. We conduct a cytological survey of 13 eriococcid species, and a cytological, genetic, and gene expression analysis of species in the genus Cystococcus , to investigate whether there is evidence for species in this clade evolving Mendelian chromosome transmission. Although we find that all species we examined exhibit PGE, the mechanism is extremely variable within Eriococcidae. Within Cystococcus , in fact, we uncover a previously undiscovered type of PGE in scale insects, where in males paternally inherited chromosomes are present, uncondensed, and expressed in somatic cells, but are eliminated prior to meiosis. Broadly, we fail to find evidence for a reversion from PGE to Mendelian inheritance in Eriococcidae, supporting the idea that asymmetric inheritance systems such as PGE may be an evolutionary trap.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it