Comment on the use of the terms clonality and asexuality:
In this work, we favoured the use of clonality rather than
asexuality due to its etymology. Clone comes from the ancient Greek
κλῶνος, referring to a regrowth, a root shoot or, lately, a growing
organic extension with new vigour (Liddell, Scott, Jones, & McKenzie,
1940). Paradoxically, clonality, the initial definition of which
mentioned plant regrowth, seems to have been used more by biologists
working on animals, while asexuality is more common in the plant
literature.
The term asexuality is currently used beyond its initial definitions,
applying to all uniparental reproduction with incomplete meiosis
schemes, including those occurring beyond prophase I and resulting in
higher levels of recombination (Nougué et al., 2015). In addition, a
societal definition emerged last year: “a [human]sexual orientation […] not valuing sex or sexual
attraction to others enough to pursue it ” (Decker, 2015 in
Bibr, 2017).