Mutation load under additive fitness effects

Mutation load under additive fitness effects

Under the traditional mutation load model based on multiplicative fitness effects, the load in a population is 1-e-U , where U is the genomic deleterious mutation rate. Because this load becomes high under large U, synergistic epistasis has been proposed as one possible means of reducing the load. However, experiments on model organisms attempting to detect synergistic epistasis have often focu...

fitness consequences of GC biased gene conversion . I . Mutation load

Mutation load under vegetative reproduction and cytoplasmic inheritance.

For reasons that remain unclear, even multicellular organisms usually originate from a single cell. Here I consider the balance between deleterious mutations and selection against them in a population with obligate vegetative reproduction, when every offspring is initiated by more than one cell of a parent. The mutation load depends on the genomic deleterious mutation rate U, strictness of sele...

Fitness Causes Bloat: Mutation

The problem of evolving, using mutation, an artificial ant to follow the Santa Fe trail is used to study the well known genetic programming feature of growth in solution length. Known variously as “bloat”, “fluff” and increasing “structural complexity”, this is often described in terms of increasing “redundancy” in the code caused by “introns”. Comparison between runs with and without fitness s...

Surprising fitness consequences of GC-biased gene conversion: I. Mutation load and inbreeding depression.

GC-biased gene conversion (gBGC) is a recombination-associated process mimicking selection in favor of G and C alleles. It is increasingly recognized as a widespread force in shaping the genomic nucleotide landscape. In recombination hotspots, gBGC can lead to bursts of fixation of GC nucleotides and to accelerated nucleotide substitution rates. It was recently shown that these episodes of stro...