The inevitability of unconditionally deleterious substitutions during adaptation.

Abstract excerpt

Studies on the genetics of adaptation from new mutations typically neglect the possibility that a deleterious mutation might fix. Nonetheless, here we show that, in many regimes, the first mutation to fix is most often deleterious, even when fitness is expected to increase in the long term. In particular, we prove that this phenomenon occurs under weak mutation for any house-of-cards model with an equilibrium...

Topics

• Adaptation, Physiological
• Amino Acid Substitution
• Animals
• Evolution, Molecular
• Genetic Fitness
• Models, Genetic
• Mutation