Super excited to be talking at Pint of Science next week! Alongside my incredibly talented friend and fellow evolutionary biologist Rishabh Kapoor!

Backcrossing evolved clones to their ancestors suggests that a single round of sex can purge this deleterious load in asexuals. (8/n)

This excess hitchhiking genetic load in asexuals underlies their decreased fitness in alternate environments. (7/n)

By sequencing clones from these populations, we find that sex narrows the outcomes of molecular evolution: sexuals have fewer functional mutations and fewer mutational targets, but a higher proportion of these are ‘multi-hit’ and likely adaptive. (6/n)

Sex increases the rate and repeatability of adaptive evolution locally, while simultaneously alleviating its fitness costs in these alternate environments. (5/n)