For most living things, sexual reproduction has proven the best overall strategy to perpetuate a species in the rough-and-tumble, unpredictable fray of natural selection. With two partners combining ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) Why are most organisms sexual? The question of why most species reproduce sexually and others reproduce asexually has stymied biologists for years (particularly since asexual ...

Usually, when somebody thinks of birds falling in love they think of just that—two birds; plural. But it turns out the California Condor, in ultra-rare instances, can fall in love with itself. Or at ...

The study reveals how Balanophora plants function despite abandoning photosynthesis and, in some species, sexual reproduction. Their plastid genomes shrank dramatically in a shared ancestor, yet the ...

A scientist has moved a step closer to turning sexually-reproducing plants into asexual reproducers, a finding that could have profound implications for agriculture. Farmers throughout the world spend ...

SMBE Journals (Molecular Biology and Evolution and Genome Biology and Evolution) Further analysis of PifA and PifB revealed that they exhibit many of the characteristics of eukaryotic host-associated ...

Sexual reproduction is costly, but it is nearly ubiquitous among plants and animals, whereas obligately asexual taxa are rare and almost always short-lived. The Red Queen hypothesis proposes that sex ...