Ants, Bees, Genomes & Evolution @ Queen Mary University London

Posted to bioRxiv: Degenerative Expansion of a Young Supergene

We have just posted a new manuscript to bioRxiv, where we describe the structural differences between the SB and Sb versions of the fire ant social chromosome pair.

We find that Sb is larger than SB and discuss how the suppression of recombination of Sb would lead to this type of ‘degenerative expansion’, as hypothesised for Y chromosomes and other non-recombining chromosomal regions. Read the manuscript, and tell us what you think!


May 23, 2018