Germ-line immortality

Recombination and the immortality of the germ line

Asexual populations irreversibly accumulate mildly deleterious mutations through the occasional stochastic loss of their least-loaded line, a process known as “Muller’s Ratchet”. This paper explores the dynamics of this process, and the role of recombination in halting the Ratchet. Simulation studies show that an optimal class comprising n, individuals is lost in about lOn, generations, implyin...

The wisdom of Weismann: epigenetic erasure mechanisms and germ line immortality.

Immortality.

“Is death necessary?“, asked biologist G. R. Taylor and stated that in 1968 in the USA alone more than a thousand teams of scientists were working on the issue of growing old and the problem of death. Some people are frozen at their death. They want to be revived as soon as a cure for their disease or the aging process has been found. Most of humanity seems to have the desire to live forever. M...

Germ Line Sex Determination

Zygotically contributed ovo gene product is required for the survival of female germ cells in Drosophila melanogaster. Trans-allelic combinations of weak and dominant ovo mutations (ovoD) result in viable germ cells that appear to be partially transformed from female to male sexual identity. The O V O ” ~ mutation is partially suppressed by many Sex-lethal alleles that affect the soma, while th...

Introduction to the germ line.

Copyright: © 2005 E. Jane Albert Hubbard and David Greenstein. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected] Introduction to the germ ...