Thursday, March 02, 2006
Sex: Why bother? Evolutionary mysteries probed at University of Houston
"What advantage did sex offer when it first appeared and why does sex persist in modern organisms, stopping them from becoming asexual again? One University of Houston professor thinks he may have uncovered some new clues in answering these questions.
By studying one of the great mysteries of biology - the evolution of sexual reproduction - Ricardo Azevedo, an assistant professor in the department of biology and biochemistry at UH, has found in a study using a computational model that a leading theory may be more plausible than previously thought, His findings are described in a paper titled 'Sexual Reproduction Selects for Robustness and Negative Epistasis in Artificial Gene Networks,' appearing in the current issue of Nature, the weekly scientific journal for biological and physical sciences research."
technorati tags: sex, university, houston, evolution, reproduction, biology, biochemistry, robustness, epistasis, gene, nature, research
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