Data from: The effect of sex on the repeatability of evolution in different environments

The adaptive function of sex has been extensively studied, while less consideration has been given to the potential downstream consequences of sex on evolution. Here we investigate one such potential consequence, the effect of sex on the repeatability of evolution. By affecting the repeatability of evolution, sex could have important implications for biodiversity, and for our ability to make predictions about the outcome of environmental change. We allowed asexual and sexual populations of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to evolve in novel environments and monitored both their change in fitness and variance in fitness after evolution. Sex affected the repeatability of evolution by changing the importance of the effect of selection, chance and ancestral constraints on the outcome of the evolutionary process. In particular, the effects of sex were highly dependent on the initial genetic composition of the population and on the environment. Given the lack of a consistent effect of sex on repeatability across the environments used here, further studies to dissect in more detail the underlying reasons for these differences as well as studies in additional environments are required if we are to have a general understanding of the effects of sex on the repeatability of evolution.有性生殖的适应性功能已得到广泛深入研究，但学界对有性生殖对演化产生的潜在下游效应却鲜少关注。本研究聚焦此类潜在效应中的一类，即有性生殖对演化可重复性的影响。演化可重复性的改变，既会对生物多样性产生重要影响，也会影响我们预测环境变化演化结果的能力。我们让无性生殖与有性生殖的莱茵衣藻（Chlamydomonas reinhardtii）种群在新颖环境中开展演化实验，并监测了演化结束后种群的适合度变化与适合度方差。有性生殖通过调整选择效应、随机因素以及祖先约束对演化进程结果的影响权重，进而改变演化的可重复性。具体而言，有性生殖的效应高度依赖种群的初始遗传组成与所处的实验环境。鉴于本研究涉及的各类环境中，有性生殖对演化可重复性的影响并无统一规律，若要全面理解有性生殖对演化可重复性的作用，还需开展更多研究以细致剖析这些差异的内在成因，并在更多环境中开展相关验证研究。