Swatantra:
Hickey, D. A., & Golding, G. B. (2018). The advantage of recombination when selection is acting at many genetic Loci. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 442, 123–128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.01.018
In this paper the authors revisited the classic Fisher-Muller models of recombination by numerical simulations. They simulated the fate of newly arised asexual clone in a population of sexually reproducing clones, in a sense they are comparing the benefits of recombination. They found that inspite of the two-fold advantage of asexuals, in about 20 generations the sexually reproducing population outpasses the fitness advantage due to recombination
Trung:
Ritz, K. R., Noor, M. A. F. & Singh, N. D. Variation in Recombination Rate: Adaptive or Not? Trends in Genetics 33, 364–374 (2017).
This paper reviews recent studies to answer the question of whether variation in recombination rate is adaptive. There is strong evidence that variable in recombination rate does indeed have a genetic basis, and there are also studies that show that selection can directly act on recombination rates which supports the idea that it is heritable also. However, there is still a hole in our understanding of how the genetic variation observed causes variation in the phenotype of recombination rates. There is also conflicting evidence regarding the fitness effect of varying recombination rates. Based on this information, I believe the lab should focus on identifying recombination modifiers in the genome and their mechanisms (link between genotypic variation and phenotypic variation, and investigating whether genetic variation in those recombination modifiers correlate to different environments (determining the fitness effect of varying recombination rates).
Marelize:
Haag, C. R., McTaggart, S. J., Didier, A., Little, T. J., & Charlesworth, D. (2009). Nucleotide polymorphism and within-gene recombination in daphnia magna and D. pulex, two cyclical parthenogens. Genetics, 182(1), 313-323. doi:10.1534/genetics.109.101147
The authors examined the patterns of nucleotide diversity at eight nuclear loci in continent wide samples of Daphnia magna and Daphnia pulex to determine the effect of partial asexual reproduction on effective population size and amount of recombination.
Sen:
NL Bray, H Pimentel, P Melsted and L Pachter, Near optimal probabilistic RNA-seq quantification, Nature Biotechnology 34, p 525–527 (2016).