Purging of Highly Deleterious Mutations Through an Extreme Bottleneck.

Abstract excerpt

Transitions to captivity often produce population bottlenecks. On the one hand, bottlenecks increase inbreeding and decrease effective population size, thus increasing extinction risk. On the other hand, elevated homozygosity associated with inbreeding may purge deleterious mutations. Previous empirical studies of purging in captive breeding programs have focused on phenotypic measurements. We test natural...

Topics

• Animals
• Inbreeding
• Female
• Mutation
• Selection, Genetic
• Homozygote
• Male