TY - JOUR T1 - The <em>wtf</em> meiotic driver gene family has unexpectedly persisted for over 100 million years JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2022.06.24.497463 SP - 2022.06.24.497463 AU - Mickael De Carvalho AU - Guo-Song Jia AU - Ananya Nidamangala Srinivasa AU - R. Blake Billmyre AU - Yan-Hui Xu AU - Jeffrey J. Lange AU - Ibrahim M. Sabbarini AU - Li-Lin Du AU - Sarah E. Zanders Y1 - 2022/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/06/26/2022.06.24.497463.abstract N2 - Meiotic drivers are selfish elements that bias their own transmission into more than half of the viable progeny produced by a driver+/driver− heterozygote. Meiotic drivers are thought to exist for relatively short evolutionary timespans because a driver gene or gene family is often found in a single species or in a group of very closely related species. Additionally, drivers are generally considered doomed to extinction when they spread to fixation or when suppressors arise. In this study, we examine the evolutionary history of the wtf meiotic drivers first discovered in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. We identify homologous genes in three other fission yeast species S. octosporus, S. osmophilus, and S. cryophilus, which are estimated to have diverged over 100 million years ago from the S. pombe lineage. Synteny evidence supports that wtf genes were present in the common ancestor of these four species. Moreover, the ancestral genes were likely drivers as wtf genes in S. octosporus cause meiotic drive. Our findings indicate that active meiotic drive systems can be maintained for long evolutionary timespans.Competing Interest StatementSEZ and LLD are inventors on a patent application based on wtf killers (patent application serial 62/491,107). ER -