Much of what we know about sex, or think we know, stems from the animal kingdom. No surprise there—we're animals and the nuances of the genetic tango are easier to study in organisms larger than infinitesimal blobs.
Trouble is, animal sex is specialized to the point of distraction. Most researchers have learned to avoid seeking universal sexual truths by examining animals' twig on the tree of life, but some still rely heavily on single animal models whereas others hawk dated taxonomic ideas without realizing it, says protistologist Frederick Spiegel of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
“Huge numbers of trees are killed over the origin and function of sex, but some people writing and teaching this material still have animal sex in the back of their minds. It's biased, and it's backwards,” says Spiegel, author of a commentary on sex published online May 10 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Enter the amoeba: a collection of blobby, typically asexual microorganisms that taxonomists have historically swept under the rug as evolutionary oddities. If biologists want to understand sex's universal features, especially its benefits and costs, Spiegel argues there's no better critter to start with.
“Sex is one of the most primitive characteristics of all eukaryotic life,” he says. “There are only a few eukaryotic lineages where we've never seen sex, and they're all amoebae. With these asexual organisms, we can compare and ask some truly synthetic questions about sex.”
Amoebas are single-celled blobs that house their DNA in nuclei, just like all of their eukaryotic relatives (humans included). Although some amoebas presumably cannot have sex and divide by mitosis, others are among the eukaryotes that can have sex—a process that can most simply be defined as ripping a genome in half and later recombining it. The practice fuels diversity by juggling genes and ultimately helps lineages weather catastrophic change over generations as natural selection acts on them.