Jingyun Chi

• Most of eukaryotes show signs of having sex or sexual recombination, and the other asexual eukaryotes have evidences of evolving from sexual ancestors. Meiotic recombination, or crossover are proved to have two pathways in eukaryotes, whose distribution was well studied in many model eukaryotes. However, the distribution of sex in specific lineage is debating. The distribution and evolution of meiotic recombination pathways in alveolates would provide us clues of lost/gaining of pathways in early eukaryotes and fill the gaps between protist and more complex multicellular organisms (fungi, animals and plants) . In this dissertation, we designed a customized program with Python, which integrated Blastp and HMMER v3.0, to search for homologs of 51 meiotic genes (11 meiosis-specific and 40 meiosis-related genes ) in the whole genome sequences or EST data of five Ciliates, seven Apicomplexa, two Chromerida, one Perkinsus, one Dinoflagellates and Chrysophytes (golden algae). All candidate homologs were then verified by reciprocal Blastp search against the nonredundant protein sequence database of NCBI and phylogeny analysis of RAxML. The gene inventory results shows that several eukaryotic meiosis-specific and meiosis-related genes are missing in every group. However, the presents of meiosis initiate protein Spo11 in some putative asexual lineage (Symbiodinium, Colpodean and Chrysophytes) suggest that they might be cryptically sexual. Within alveolates, Apicomplexa are capable of both pathways, while Ciliates and Dinoflagellates using a set of mitotic repair proteins for meiotic recombination. We speculated that the result of the abandonment of the pathway I might due to the abnormal chromosome structure of both Ciliates and Dinoflagellates. Phylogenetic analysis of the distribution of meiotic pathways within alveolates suggest that the reduction of meiotic pathway I in Ciliates and Dinoflagellates are independent. Considering that Apicomplexa are capable of both meiotic pathways, we would infer that those two pathways exist in the common ancestor of alveolates.