Increased heterosis in selfing populations of a perennial forb.

ABSTRACT: Quantifying the importance of random genetic drift in natural populations is central to understanding the potential limits to natural selection. One approach is to estimate the magnitude of heterosis, the increased fitness of progeny derived from crosses between populations relative to crosses within populations caused by the heterozygous masking of deleterious recessive or nearly recessive alleles that have been fixed by drift within populations. Self-fertilization is expected to reduce the effective population size by half relative to outcrossing, and population bottlenecks may be common during the transition to selfing. Therefore, chance fixation of deleterious alleles due to drift in selfing populations should increase heterosis between populations. Increased homozygosity due to fixati

SUBMITTER: Oakley CG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4671326 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature