Susana Maria Reis Nunes de Freitas

The diversity of all living beings is fuelled by mutation, adaptation events and complemented by sexual reproduction. Organisms that evolved from sexual to asexual, such as the parthenogenetic animals, are considered a faux pas under current evolutionary trends. However, these organisms can show great success, and in some situations even achieve higher prevalence than their closest bisexual relatives, outcompeting them in nature. The focus of my research is to try to understand how bisexual animals can give rise to parthenogenetic lineages, within a phylogeographic standpoint, using as a biological model a complex of rock lizards, with bisexual and parthenogenetic lineages.