08/09/2026
Maurine Neiman war 2025 als Gastprofessorin am Forschungsinstitut für Limnologie in Mondsee in der Forschungsgruppe von Dunja Lamatsch mit ihrer Arbeit an "Potamo" beschäftigt.
When evolutionary biologist Maurine Neiman first traveled to New Zealand as an undergraduate on a study abroad program in the late 1990s, she couldn’t have predicted that research on the evolution of s*x would eventually bring her back. On the shores of Lake Alexandrina, an alpine lake nestled among the craggy peaks of New Zealand’s South Island, most 𝘗𝘰𝘵𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘱𝘺𝘳𝘨𝘶𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘱𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘶𝘮 snails reproduce s*xually — the classic egg-meets-sperm. Some females, however, reproduce as*xually by making clones of themselves. Neiman wanted to know why.
Except for the way they reproduce, the two types of snails are almost identical. Neiman figured that there must be some genetic difference between them. When her lab began piecing together the genomes of 30 different s*xually reproducing “potamo” species, they stumbled upon something odd. While many of the genes they sequenced had two copies, one maternal and one paternal, just as expected, others had three, even four.
When several doctoral students combed through the sequencing results, there was only one way to explain why so many extra gene copies were scattered across the whole of the potamo genome. Sometime in the last million or so years, the snail had undergone a whole-genome duplication.
“The snails are hiding this secret in their genome,” Neiman said. “No one expected that.”
Read the full story: https://www.quantamagazine.org/genome-duplication-is-a-radical-evolutionary-gamble-20260902/
