© GEORGE RETSECK; SCANS: PNAS, 112:4405-10, 2015
The emergence of one species from another occurs when the two groups can no longer interbreed. Such reproductive isolation is considered a key evolutionary process, and yet our knowledge of the mechanisms and mutations by which it actually occurs has been confined to conjecture. “We can speculate on the history of evolution from various observations,” says Masayuki Yamamoto, director general of the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki, Japan. “However, it is virtually impossible to reproduce it experimentally.”
Virtually, but not entirely, impossible, it seems. Chikashi Shimoda’s team at Osaka City University in Japan has achieved experimental speciation in the yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe.
The two sexes of S. pombe—M and P, for “minus” and “plus”—each secrete a pheromone (M factor and P factor), which ...
