Hybrids reveal the barriers to successful mating between species
When species manage to mix, the odds are stacked against their offspring
By
Tina Hesman Saey
10:00am, October 31, 2017
It’s a tale as old as wine. Two organisms meet over a barrel of alcohol and decide to mate.
Geneticist Maitreya Dunham didn’t see it happen. But she has molecular evidence that two yeast species produced a hybrid in an old warehouse turned microbrewery. The two species had grown apart, evolutionarily speaking, about 10 million to 20 million years ago, Dunham, of the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues calculate. Yet the distant relatives interbred, producing the hybrid that ended up in a barrel of wild beer.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/hybrids-reveal-barriers-successful-mating-between-species
