RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 The maintenance of genetic polymorphism underlying sexually antagonistic traits
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2023.10.10.561678
DO 10.1101/2023.10.10.561678
A1 Flintham, Ewan
A1 Savolainen, Vincent
A1 Otto, Sarah
A1 Reuter, Max
A1 Mullon, Charles
YR 2024
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2024/09/02/2023.10.10.561678.abstract
AB Selection often favours different trait values in males and females, leading to genetic conflicts between the sexes when traits have a shared genetic basis. Such sexual antagonism has been proposed to maintain genetic polymorphism. However, this notion is based on insights from population genetic models of single loci with fixed fitness effects. It is thus unclear how readily polymorphism emerges from sex-specific selection acting on continuous traits, where fitness effects arise from the genotype-phenotype map and the fitness landscape. Here we model the evolution of a continuous trait that has a shared genetic basis but different optima in males and females, considering a wide variety of genetic architectures and fitness landscapes. For autosomal loci, the long-term maintenance of polymorphism requires strong conflict between males and females that generates uncharacteristic sex-specific fitness patterns. Instead, more plausible sex-specific fitness landscapes typically generate stabilising selection leading to an evolutionarily stable state that consists of a single homozygous genotype. Except for sites tightly linked to the sex determining region, our results indicate that genetic variation due to sexual antagonism should arise only rarely and often be transient, making these signatures challenging to detect in genomic data.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.