Super excited that this story by @borissieber.bsky.social is now on BioRxiv!

For decades, we thought there was no MAPK scaffold for the ERK-like cascade that promotes sexual reproduction in fission yeast ... until Boris found it !

See the thread 👇 and enjoy the paper!

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

During the course of evolution, we found a case of genetic assimilation at the telomeric end of chromosome I: a subtelomeric deletion triggered silencing that stabilized previously unstable, oscillatory fusion efficiency—an adaptation shaped by intertwined genomic and epigenetic changes.

Our data trace a negative correlation between mating efficiency and proliferation, capturing a classic life-history trade-off in action.

We pushed yeast through 18 cycles of mitosis–meiosis by painstaking tetrad dissection to enforce selection. Why 18? Not a lucky Chinese number—COVID shut us down at that time😂

Thrilled to finally share this seven-year story—a journey that began during my postdoc in Sophie’s lab.
@sophiemartinlab.bsky.social and continued for four more years as I built my own lab in Shenzhen.

Sex or growth? Life must continually balance these strategies. We forced yeast to choose and captured the trade-off in real time. Evolution rewired existing regulators and fixed them through genetic assimilation, creating specialists for sex at the cost of growth.
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...