Synergistic epistasis of the deleterious effects of transposable elements.

ABSTRACT: The replicative nature and generally deleterious effects of transposable elements (TEs) raise an outstanding question about how TE copy number is stably contained in host populations. Classic theoretical analyses predict that, when the decline in fitness due to each additional TE insertion is greater than linear, or when there is synergistic epistasis, selection against TEs can result in a stable equilibrium of TE copy number. While several mechanisms are predicted to yield synergistic deleterious effects of TEs, we lack empirical investigations of the presence of such epistatic interactions. Purifying selection with synergistic epistasis generates repulsion linkage between deleterious alleles. We investigated this population genetic signal in the likely ancestral Drosophila melanogaster p

SUBMITTER: Lee YCG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9097265 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature