Population genetics of the cytoplasm and the units of selection on mitochondrial DNA in Drosophila melanogaster.

ABSTRACT: Biological variation exists across a nested set of hierarchical levels from nucleotides within genes to populations within species to lineages within the tree of life. How selection acts across this hierarchy is a long-standing question in evolutionary biology. Recent studies have suggested that genome size is influenced largely by the balance of selection, mutation and drift in lineages with different population sizes. Here we use population cage and maternal transmission experiments to identify the relative strength of selection at an individual and cytoplasmic level. No significant trends were observed in the frequency of large (L) and small (S) mtDNAs across 14 generations in population cages. In all replicate cages, new length variants were observed in heteroplasmic states indicating

SUBMITTER: Rand DM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3149803 | biostudies-literature | 2011 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature