Understanding and predicting the fitness decline of shrunk populations: inbreeding, purging, mutation, and standard selection.

ABSTRACT: The joint consequences of inbreeding, natural selection, and deleterious mutation on mean fitness after population shrinkage are of great importance in evolution and can be critical to the conservation of endangered populations. I present simple analytical equations that predict these consequences, improving and extending a previous heuristic treatment. Purge is defined as the "extra" selection induced by inbreeding, due to the "extra" fitness disadvantage (2d) of homozygotes for (partially) recessive deleterious alleles. Its effect is accounted for by using, instead of the classical inbreeding coefficient f, a purged inbreeding coefficient g that is weighed by the reduction of the frequency of deleterious alleles caused by purging. When the effective size of a large population is reduced

SUBMITTER: Garcia-Dorado A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3316656 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature