The speed of evolution and maintenance of variation in asexual populations.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The rate at which beneficial mutations accumulate determines how fast asexual populations evolve, but this is only partially understood. Some recent clonal-interference models suggest that evolution in large asexual populations is limited because smaller beneficial mutations are outcompeted by larger beneficial mutations that occur in different lineages within the same population. This analysis assumes that the important mutations fix one at a time; it ignores multiple beneficial mutations that occur in the lineage of an earlier beneficial mutation, before the first mutation in the series can fix. We focus on the effects of such multiple mutations.

Results

Our analysis predicts that the variation in fitness maintained by a continuously evolving population increase

SUBMITTER: Desai MM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2987722 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature