This week we read Fishman and Kelly 2015 “Centromere–associated meiotic drive and female fitness variation in Mimulus”. It’s rare a paper that gets unabashed uniform positive reviews from the group, but this was one of those occasions. We loved this. A great example of combining popgen theory with detailed field work, by folks who’ve thought long and hard about the genetics and ecology of the species. Fun to see how mating system and environment can have such large effects on the outcome of a driving element too. Really nice work, and well written, leaving us with surprisingly few comments and questions. When we’re bringing up the fact that the authors switch sometimes between D’ and D- as a problem with the paper, you know we’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

We did wonder quite a bit about the year effects, especially why in 2012 DD homozygotes actually produced more seed. One factor we considered was whether fewer flowers in 2012 led to a decrease in the selfing rate (a la Karron et al. 2004), which would at least decrease the cost of the DD.

Our only other question was why dominance was included in some of the theory, but then mostly ignored as the authors assume (and ba)ck up with data) that the deleterious effects of D are predominantly recessive.