Hongan Long, Parul Johri, Jean-Francois Gout, Jiahao Ni, Yue Hao, Timothy Licknack, Yaohai Wang, Jiao Pan, Berenice Jiménez-Marín, Michael Lynch
The ciliate genus Paramecium served as one of the first model systems in microbial eukaryotic genetics, contributing much to the early understanding of phenomena as diverse as genome rearrangement, cryptic speciation, cytoplasmic inheritance, and endosymbiosis, as well as more recently to the evolution of mating types, introns, and roles of small RNAs in DNA processing. Substantial progress has recently been made in the area of comparative and population genomics. Paramecium species combine some of the lowest known mutation rates with some of the largest known effective populations, along with likely very high recombination rates, thereby harboring a population-genetic environment that promotes an exceptionally efficient capacity for selection...
November 27, 2023: Annual Review of Genetics