The Maintenance of Deleterious Variation in Wild Chinese Rhesus Macaques.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how deleterious variation is shaped and maintained in natural populations is important in conservation and evolutionary biology, as decreased fitness caused by these deleterious mutations can potentially lead to an increase in extinction risk. It is known that demographic processes can influence these patterns. For example, population bottlenecks and inbreeding increase the probability of inheriting identical-by-descent haplotypes from a recent common ancestor, creating long tracts of homozygous genotypes called runs of homozygosity (ROH), which have been associated with an accumulation of mildly deleterious homozygotes. Counter intuitively, positive selection can also maintain deleterious variants in a population through genetic hitchhiking. Here we analyze the whole genomes

SUBMITTER: Steux C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11071285 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature