Meiosis as an Evolutionary Adaptation for DNA Repair

evolutionary origin and was present in the last common ancestor of eukaryotes.Recently, this view received further support from a study of amoebae.Although amoebae generally have been assumed to be asexual, Lahr et al. (2011) showed that the majority of amoeboid lineages were likely anciently sexual, and that most asexual groups have probably arisen recently and independently.Eukaryotes arose in evolution from prokaryotes, and eukaryotic meiosis may have arisen from bacterial transformation, a naturally occurring sexual process in prokaryotes.The fundamental similarities between transformation and meiosis have been explored (H. Bernstein & C. Bernstein, 2010).Bacterial transformation, like meiosis, involves alignment and recombination between non-sister homologous chromosomes (or parts of chromosomes) originating from different parents.Both during transformation and meiosis, homologs of the bacterial recA gene play a central role in the strand transfer reactions of recombination, indicating a mechanistic similarity.Also, bacterial transformation is induced by environmental stresses that are similar to those that induce meiosis in protists and simple multicellular eukaryotes, suggesting that there was continuity in the evolutionary transition from prokaryotic sex to eukaryotic sex.Evidence indicates that bacterial transformation is an adaptation for repairing DNA (Michod et al.,