Sex differences in the plasticity of life history in response to social environment

Predicting how social environment affects life history variation is critical to understanding if, and when, selection favors alternative life history development, especially in systems in which social interactions change over time or space. While sexual selection theory predicts that males and females should respond differently to variation in the social environment, few studies have examined the responses of both male and female phenotypes to the same gradient of social environment. In this study, we used a livebearing fish to determine how males and females altered their life histories in response to variation in social environment during development. We found that both males and females delayed maturity and attained larger sizes when their social environment included adults, in contrast to developing in juvenile-only environments. The magnitude of this effect differed substantially between the sexes. The common pattern of response in the sexes suggested that life history tradeoffs rather than sexual selection, is responsible for these changes in life-history expression. These effects make the relationship between genotype and phenotype depend strongly on the environment experienced by each individual. These results indicate that social environment is an important driver of life history variation in sailfin mollies and can be at least as important as abiotic effects

Female mating preferences for male morphological traits used in species and mate recognition in the Mexican sailfin mollies, Poecilia velifera and Poecilia petenensis

We tested whether sexually selected morphological traits in the sailfin mollies, Poecilia velifera and Poecilia petenensis, are also used in species recognition. Our first experiment, using live males as stimuli and providing females with olfactory as well as visual cues, found that females of both sailfin species preferred conspecific males to males of shortfin species. However, neither species preferred conspecific males when compared with heterospecific sailfin males, suggesting that premating reproductive isolation is not well developed between them. Our second experiment, providing females with only visual cues when distinguishing between live males, found that females of P. velifera preferred the larger of 2 stimulus males, regardless of whether the larger male was a conspecific or an heterospecific sailfin male. Such a preference for the larger sized male was not found in P. petenensis. To further investigate the role of the dorsal "sailfin" in species recognition, we used model males that varied only in the species identity of their dorsal fins. Females of both sailfin species preferred conspecific models with conspecific sailfins to those with dorsal fins of the shortfin species. In addition, females of P. velifera preferred the model with the largest sailfin, regardless of species identity. Similarly to the live male experiments, females of P. petenensis did not distinguish between conspecific and heterospecific sailfins. Overall, our study suggests that females of P. velifera have a generalized preference for larger males and that species-specific differences in sailfin shape do not lead to premating reproductive isolation between these 2 sailfin species. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.

Left Panel: variants obtained from exome sequencing of tumor samples from Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) patients.

<p>Genes were grouped based on relevant biological activities/pathways. Right Panel: Variants identified as potential drivers (red: high-confidence drivers; gold: lower confidence drivers. Inset: Color coding scheme for types of mutations (mis-sense, termination, splice site, in-frame deletion), confidence of driver likelihood (high-confidence, lower confidence). Asterisks indicate mutations present in the COSMIC (<u>C</u>atalogue <u>o</u>f <u>S</u>omatic <u>M</u>utations in <u>C</u>ancer) database. The same coding scheme is used in Figs <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0194790#pone.0194790.g002" target="_blank">2</a>–<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0194790#pone.0194790.g005" target="_blank">5</a>.</p