Viral pathogens and the advantage of sex in the perennial grass Anthoxanthum odoratum

Abstract The ubiquity of sexual reproduction among plants and animals remains one of the major unresolved paradoxes of modern evolutionary biology. In order for sex to be maintained in populations, sex must confer immediate and substantial fitness benefits. Theoreticians have proposed numerous mechanisms to explain how such advantages arise, but experimental data are few. In one well-studied popul…