Genome Organization and Social Evolution in Hymenoptera

摘要

Hunt and Page (1995) originally reported that Apis mellifera has an unusually large recombinational map and hypothesized that it is related to male ha-ploidy in Hymenoptera. Our results clearly falsify this hypothesis because the Hymenoptera contain both very large (Hunt and Page 1995) and very small genome maps (Antolin et al. 1995; Gadau et al. 1999; Laurent et al. 1998; Fig. 1). An alternative, structural explanation is that A. mellifera has a large recombinational map because it has many chromosomes. In addition to needing to explain why it has more chromosomes, no correlation between chromosome number and recombination frequency was found in our study (Table 1). These results suggest functional rather than structural explanations for variation in recombinational size of genomes within the Hymenoptera.