Although sexual reproduction is ubiquitous throughout nature, the molecular machinery behind it has been repeatedly disrupted during evolution, leading to the emergence of asexual lineages in all eukaryotic phyla. Despite intensive research, little is known about what causes the switch from sexual reproduction to asexuality.Interspecific hybridization is one of the candidate explanations, but the reasons for the apparent association between hybridization and asexuality remain unclear. In this study, we combined cross-breeding experiments with population genetic and phylogenomic approaches to reveal the history of speciation and asexuality evolution in European spined loaches (Cobitis). Contemporary species readily hybridize in hybrid zones, but produce infertile males and fertile but clonally reproducing females that cannot mediate introgressions. However, our analysis of exome data indicates that intensive gene flow between species has occurred in the past. Crossings among species with various genetic distances showed that, while distantly related species produced asexual females and sterile males, closely related species produce sexually reproducing hybrids of both sexes. Our results suggest that hybridization leads to sexual hybrids at the initial stages of speciation, but as the species diverge further, the gradual accumulation of reproductive incompatibilities between species could distort their gametogenesis towards asexuality. Interestingly, comparative analysis of published data revealed that hybrid asexuality generally evolves at lower genetic divergences than hybrid sterility or inviability. Given that hybrid asexuality effectively restricts gene flow, it may establish a primary reproductive barrier earlier during diversification than other "classical" forms of postzygotic incompatibilities. Hybrid asexuality may thus indirectly contribute to the speciation process. K E Y W O R D Sbalance hypothesis, coalescence, evolution of asexuality, hybridization, phylogeography,

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We investigate the dynamics of head lice infections in schools, by considering a model for endemic infection based on a stochastic SIS (susceptible-infected-susceptible) epidemic model, with the addition of an external source of infection. We deduce a range of properties of our model, including the length of a single outbreak of infection. We use the stationary distribution of the number of infected individuals, in conjunction with data from a recent study carried out in Welsh schools on the prevalence of head lice infections, and employ maximum likelihood methods to obtain estimates of the model parameters. A complication is that, for each school, only a sample of the pupils was checked for infection. Our likelihood function takes account of the missing data by incorporating a hypergeometric sampling element. We arrive at estimates of the ratios of the "within school" and "external source" transmission rates to the recovery rate and use these to obtain estimates for various quantities of interest.

The isolation-with-migration (IM) model is commonly used to make inferences about gene flow during speciation, using polymorphism data. However, it has been reported that the parameter estimates obtained by fitting the IM model are very sensitive to the model’s assumptions—including the assumption of constant gene flow until the present. This article is concerned with the isolation-with-initial-migration (IIM) model, which drops precisely this assumption. In the IIM model, one ancestral population divides into two descendant subpopulations, between which there is an initial period of gene flow and a subsequent period of isolation. We derive a very fast method of fitting an extended version of the IIM model, which also allows for asymmetric gene flow and unequal population sizes. This is a maximum-likelihood method, applicable to data on the number of segregating sites between pairs of DNA sequences from a large number of independent loci. In addition to obtaining parameter estimates, our method can also be used, by means of likelihood-ratio tests, to distinguish between alternative models representing the following divergence scenarios: (a) divergence with potentially asymmetric gene flow until the present, (b) divergence with potentially asymmetric gene flow until some point in the past and in isolation since then, and (c) divergence in complete isolation. We illustrate the procedure on pairs of Drosophila sequences from ∼30,000 loci. The computing time needed to fit the most complex version of the model to this data set is only a couple of minutes. The R code to fit the IIM model can be found in the supplementary files of this article.

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