Sexual selection and pseudogenization in primate fertilization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mouse sperm protein ZP3R interacts with proteins in the egg coat and mediates sperm-egg adhesion in a species-specific manner. Understanding the function and evolution of such genes has important implications for studies of speciation, reproductive success, and infertility. A recent analysis showed that (1) the human pseudogene C4BPAP1 is the ortholog of Zp3r, (2) ZP3R pseudogenization evolved independently in parallel among several primate lineages, and (3) functional ZP3R genes evolve under positive selection among other primate species. The causes of this pseudogenization of ZP3R are unknown. To explore one plausible cause (changes in sexual selection on males), we searched for ZP3R pseudogenes in recently published genomes, then compared sexually selected male traits among lineages with and without a functional ZP3R. We found that traits associated with more intense sexual selection on males (larger male body size, larger male canines, larger testes) were associated with functional ZP3R expression, and suggest that a relaxation of sexual selection may be associated with ZP3R pseudogenization. We propose the causal relationship implies an evolutionary cost to maintaining redundancy in the suite of primate fertilization genes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".