| Parthenogenetic lizards are often polyploid hybrids of divergent sexual ancestors, which establishes a unique genomic environment in which to study the evolutionary consequences of an asexual life history. To set these genomic studies in a phylogenetic context, I investigated the evolutionary history of the sexual ancestors of the parthenogenetic lineages of the gecko Heteronotia binoei in order to understand the origin of the asexual genome. One trend seen in parthenogenetic lizards is the presence of large, tandem, independently-evolved duplications in their mitochondrial genomes. Redundancy of duplicated genes has allowed rare mitochondrial pseudogenes to accumulate, which, upon their purging, will result in gene rearrangement. Consistent with the hypothesis that the hybrid nature of asexual genomes may disrupt coevolved gene complexes, I found evidence of altered interactions within a cytonuclear complex between mitochondrial lineages of parthenogenetic Heteronotia. |
