Epistasis, pleiotropy, and the mutation load in sexual and asexual populations.

Abstract excerpt

Mutation may impose a substantial load on populations, which varies according to the reproductive mode of organisms. Over the past years, various authors used adaptive landscape models to predict the long-term effect of mutation on mean fitness; however, many of these studies assumed very weak mutation rates, so that at most one mutation segregates in the population. In this article, we derive several simple...

Topics

• Animals
• Epistasis, Genetic
• Evolution, Molecular
• Genetic Load
• Genetic Pleiotropy
• Models, Genetic
• Mutation
• Reproduction, Asexual