LAT/Reuters: Yeast Study Confirms the Advantages of Sex

[DeepModem Mom]

Yeast Study Confirms the Advantages of Sex
A long-accepted theory about the spread of beneficial genes gets support in the lab.

From Reuters


It's official: Sex is good for you. Well, at least it's good for yeast....

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(Sexual reproduction) wastes time and energy, it mixes up perfectly good genes, and females, who do nearly all of the reproductive work, get to pass on only half their genetic material. So scientists have wondered: Why sex? August Weismann, a 19th century theorist, proposed that sexual reproduction helps speed up natural selection by allowing good genes to spread more quickly through a population and bad genes to disappear faster. That makes sex good for the species.

Although generally accepted, Weismann's theory has been difficult to prove in the lab. But a team of British scientists has at last shown what is so beneficial about sex. In yeast, at least....

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...Matthew Goddard and a team of scientists from Imperial College London made two versions of otherwise identical yeast, one that could reproduce both ways and one that could only reproduce asexually...."Our results indicate that sexual reproduction can provide a selective advantage during adaptation to new environments," they wrote in the current Nature....


http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-yeast2apr02,0,3298694.story?coll=la-home-science

[ltfranklin]

1. And.....?

...Matthew Goddard and a team of scientists from Imperial College London made two versions of otherwise identical yeast, one that could reproduce both ways and one that could only reproduce asexually...."Our results indicate that sexual reproduction can provide a selective advantage during adaptation to new environments," they wrote in the current Nature....

As well as make a lovely, fluffy loaf of bread!

Tell me, did the asexual yeast tend to make rather, um, floppy loaves?

[daleo]

2. Sex may be good for yeast

But yeast ain't good for sex.

[liberalhistorian]

3. ROFLMAO!

Ain't that the damned truth!

[The Doctor.]

4. Ummm...

It's kind of interesting that someone came up with such a study.

To show what common scientific sense has said all along.

It is good to have data... even if it's not timely.

[mhr]

5. Don't Tell The Fundies This Will Send Them Into Conceptual Overload

After the cathartic orgy of faux Christianity just witnessed over Ms. Schiavo, do we really need them going over the top again?

Some things should only be witnessed once.

[ConcernedCanuk]

6. AAAAaaaaaaaaaackkkk! - no s-e-x threads please!

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:silly: