Dr Michael Mogie
Profile
Current Research
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to resolve the paradox of the maintenance of sexual reproduction in the overwhelming majority of eukaryotes despite the 'cost of sex'. The role that ecology, development, genes, life history, polyploidy and the male function play in determining the incidence and distribution of asexual reproduction per se, and of its different forms, are being investigated, using mathematical modelling and comparative biology.
These techniques are demonstrating that the 'cost of sex' is absent from homosporous taxa and that the absence of asexual reproduction among gymnosperms, and among many groups of flowering plants, is due to it never having arisen, rather than to it having arisen but been selected against. It has also been demonstrated that it is likely that the ancestral egg type in land plants lacked parthenogenetic potential and that such potential in flowering plants is the result of a phylogenetic shift in the identity of the egg cell, this cell in flowering plants being a mitotic precursor of the ancestral egg: this ability to undergo mitosis is expressed as parthenogenetic potential. Furthermore, it is becoming clear that the retention of an at least partially effective male function by asexuals that are descended from hermaphrodite sexual ancestors (e.g. most asexual flowering plants), and non-random dispersal of gametes and offspring, can significantly influence the period during which sexuals and related asexuals coexist.
Other research interests include the correlation between developmental instability and ecological performance, and the extent to which current concepts in biology are influenced by history.
Goals
To understand the factors favouring the evolution and maintenance of sexual and asexual reproduction.
Publications
Mogie, M., 2013. Premeiotic endomitosis and the costs and benefits of asexual reproduction. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 109 (2), pp. 487-495.
Mogie, M., 2011. Pollen profile, spatial structure, and access to sex in asexual hermaphrodites. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 103 (4), pp. 954-966.
Carrillo, C., Cherednichenko, K., Britton, N. F. and Mogie, M., 2009. Dynamic coexistence of sexual and asexual invasion fronts in a system of integro-difference equations. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 71 (7), pp. 1612-1625.
