Article
Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation by purging hitchhiking load.
Science (New York, N.Y.) - 23 Apr 2026
Pai Shreyas V, Humphrey Parris T, Simonet Camille, Kosheleva Katya, Limdi Anurag, Desai Michael M
Abstract excerpt
Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms that maintain sex despite its direct costs is a long-standing challenge. Previous work has shown that sexual recombination can accelerate adaptation, in part by separating beneficial mutations from deleterious hitchhikers. However, earlier studies focused on effects of sex in a constant environment. We show that recombination provides an advantage during changing...
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