A Short-Term Advantage for Syngamy in the Origin of Eukaryotic Sex: Effects of Cell Fusion on Cell Cycle Duration and Other Effects Related to the Duration of the Cell Cycle—Relationship between Cell Growth Curve and the Optimal Size of the Species, and Circadian Cell Cycle in Photosynthetic Unicellular Organisms
Figure 7
Hypothetical sexual cell cycle involving two equal-size cells. Hypothetical sexual cell cycle involving two equal-size cells in the middle of the G1 phase (black line) compared to asexual (dashed grey line). Both cells are of the same size and are right in the middle of G1. The checkpoints of the cell cycle depend on cell size and ploidy as shown above; thus the fused cell, diploid by syngamy, should have larger checkpoints; we will make them exactly two times those of the haploid cell cycle. In this case, the sexual cell cycle is longer than the asexual cycle, due to the second division.
