Phenotypic plasticity promotes recombination and gene clustering in periodic environments

Abstract

While theory offers clear predictions for when recombination will evolve in changing environments, it is unclear what natural scenarios can generate the necessary conditions. The Red Queen hypothesis provides one such scenario, but it requires antagonistic host–parasite interactions. Here we present a novel scenario for the evolution of recombination in finite populations: the genomic storage effect due to phenotypic plasticity. Using analytic approximations and Monte-Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that balanced polymorphism and recombination evolve between a target locus that codes for a seasonally selected trait and a plasticity modifier locus that modulates the effects of target-locus alleles. Furthermore, we show that selection suppresses recombination among multiple co-modulated target loci, in the absence of epistasis among them, which produces a cluster of linked selected loci. These results provide a novel biological scenario for the evolution of recombination and supergenes.