A team of scientists from the University of Montreal and the Research Center of the Sainte-Justine University Hospital (Canada) has found that sexual reproduction reduces the propensity for diseases due to the recombination of genetic material . The finding has been published in the journal Nature Genetics .
Is there a genetic advantage over sexual reproduction? Multiple theories have been shuffled for decades but until now it has not been confirmed in humans. The group of researchers found that parts of the human genome that do not recombine as often as others tend to carry a very high proportion of disease-prone genetic mutations . The longer the chromosomes are without recombining, the more negative mutations accumulate and our genetic material worsens.
The solution to these dire mutations is sexual reproduction. But since these mutations reside in the less dynamic segments of our genome, the process can take many hundreds of generations . This discovery gives us a better understanding of how we, as human beings, gain or lose risk of developing or contracting diseases ”, explains Philip Awadalla, leader of the study.
And it is that as we have sexual relations and later we conceive, our exchange of genetic material between men and women promotes our species to evolve, however, these do not mix in a uniform way , so that recombination may be less frequent in some generations than others.
This discovery has been possible thanks to the analysis of the sequenced genomes of hundreds of people from the Canadian genetic data repository CARTaGENE and the 1,000 Genomes Project.
