An unrecognized genetic predisposition for sperm competition in aphids

preprint OA: closed
Full text JSON View at publisher
Full text 2,346 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · click to expand
This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. A hitherto unrecognized genetic predisposition for sperm competition exists in aphids. The females of a clone are diploid for the autosomes and sex chromosomes: AA/XX (where A stands for a haploid set of autosomes). Production of males is parthenogenetic, except for the random loss of one X chromosome. Male offspring is diploid for the autosomes but haploid for the sex chromosomes (AA/X0). Hence, each clone produces two brotherhoods of males. The relatedness of males sharing the same X chromosome will be 1. Their relatedness to males of the same clone that received the other X chromosome will be less than 1. Sperm results from meiosis and is haploid, but the sperm cells that do not receive an X chromosome die. The surviving sperm cells share the male’s X chromosome, which makes up the largest part of the genome. Thus, the two brotherhoods of males of a clone produce two kinships of sperm. Sperm cells carrying the same X chromosome will share a part of the genome that is larger than 0.5. Those carrying different X chromosomes will share a part less than 0.5. The above can lead to sperm competition between males from the same clone. Competition from males of different clones can increase sperm competition even further. Ecological factors mixing different clones will have this effect. Sperm cooperation within ejaculates is a possible adaptation to sperm competition. Cystic spermatogenesis, in turn, is a physiological preadaptation for sperm cooperation. Sperm cooperation should thus be as frequent in aphids as in related taxa, like scale insects. Yet, the evidence is inconclusive. This discrepancy between theory and evidence demands an explanation. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2F90R Life Sciences sperm competition, sperm cooperation, sperm relatedness, Aphidoidea Published: 2024-07-19 03:09 Last Updated: 2024-07-24 16:09 CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Language: English

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2024) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00