Trends in Parasitology
LetterResponse to Tibayrenc et al.: can recombination in Leishmania parasites be so rare?
Section snippets
Confusing selfing and clonality
The first argument appearing in Tibayrenc and Ayala's letter is that ‘most scientists working on pathogens consider selfing as a particular case of clonality’. Tibayrenc and Ayala self-cite their own paper [3] where, if we retrieve self-citations and some other papers where authors never wrote that selfing was a particular case of clonality (e.g., [4]) or even clearly made the distinction between clonality and selfing [5], we are left with only few remaining articles (most of which refer to
LD and inappropriate sampling strategies
Tibayrenc and Ayala state again that one of the criteria to be taken into account for the PCE model is LD. To avoid that Wahlund effect in LD, the authors recommend performing broad sampling across the whole ecogeographical range of species [1]. Computer simulations showed that LD does not provide reliable measurements to make the distinction between clonal and sexual reproductions [10]. Moreover, in our review, we specifically underlined that spatiotemporal effects, combined with inbreeding
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the IRD and the CNRS for financial support. This work was also supported by the French National Project ANR 06- SEST-20 IAEL. We would like to thank the anonymous referee for their comments that helped improve this letter.
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Cited by (0)
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These two authors contributed equally to this work.