Female only lizard species that clones itself created in the lab

Arstechnica: Researchers have bred a new species of all-female lizard, mimicking a process that has happened naturally in the past but has never been directly observed.

“It’s recreating the events that lead to new species,” said cell biologist Peter Baumann of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, whose new species is described May 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It relates to the question of how these unisexual species arise in the first place.”

Female-only species that reproduce by cloning themselves—a process called parthenogenesis, in which embryos develop without fertilization—were once considered dead-end evolutionary flukes. But in the last decade, unisexuality has been found in more than 80 groups of fish, amphibian and reptiles. It might not be such a dead end after all.

Best-known among all unisexual species are Aspidoscelis, the whiptail lizards of southwestern North America, of which 7 of 12 species are unisexual. Genetic studies suggest their unisexuality emerged from historical unions of two sexually-reproducing lizards belonging to closely-related species, the hybrid offspring of which possessed mutations needed for parthenogenesis.

In two of the unisexual whiptails, that seems to have been enough; they immediately went all-female. In the other five, it took another round of traditional sexual mating. Those species are so-called triploids, bearing two sets of chromosomes from the original mother species and one from the father.

Full article at Arstechnica