Endophyte survival without sex

Sex is considerably more costly for an organism than clonal reproduction. How it conveys sufficient benefits to outweigh this cost remains unclear, One of the main arguments that such benefits exist is the widespread distribution of sex and the short evolutionary lifespan of asexual lineages. However, too little is known about the reproductive biology of microorganisms to be certain the sex is wide-spread among them. Among the epichole endophytes the ability to carry out sexual reproduction is frequently lost, and closely related sexual and asexual lineages can be readily collected. This offers an opportunity to test if asexual endophyte lineages hava a shorter lifespan than sexual lineages, which would indicate that sex conveys advantages to epichole endophytes. Using a novel phylogent-based statistical approach, we found strong evidence that asexual endophyte lineages are short-lived compared to sexual lineages.