The Role of Deleterious Substitutions in Crop Genomes.

ABSTRACT: Populations continually incur new mutations with fitness effects ranging from lethal to adaptive. While the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations is not directly observable, many mutations likely either have no effect on organismal fitness or are deleterious. Historically, it has been hypothesized that a population may carry many mildly deleterious variants as segregating variation, which reduces the mean absolute fitness of the population. Recent advances in sequencing technology and sequence conservation-based metrics for inferring the functional effect of a variant permit examination of the persistence of deleterious variants in populations. The issue of segregating deleterious variation is particularly important for crop improvement, because the demographic history of domest

SUBMITTER: Kono TJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4989107 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature