Mutation and sex in a competitive world

Joel R. Peck () and David Waxman
Additional contact information
Joel R. Peck: Centre for the Study of Evolution, The University of Sussex
David Waxman: Centre for the Study of Evolution, The University of Sussex

Nature, 2000, vol. 406, issue 6794, 399-404

Abstract: Abstract How do deleterious mutations interact to affect fitness? The answer to this question has substantial implications for a variety of important problems in population biology, including the evolution of sex1,2,3, the rate of adaptation4,5 and the conservation of small populations3,6,7,8. Here we analyse a mathematical model of competition for food in which deleterious mutations affect competitive ability. We show that, if individuals usually compete in small groups, then competition can easily lead to a type of genetic interaction known as synergistic epistasis. This means that a deleterious mutation is most damaging in a genome that already has many other deleterious mutations. We also show that competition in small groups can produce a large advantage for sexual populations, both in mean fitness and in ability to resist invasion by asexual lineages. One implication of our findings is that experimental efforts to demonstrate synergistic epistasis may not succeed unless the experiments are redesigned to make them much more naturalistic.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35019055 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:406:y:2000:i:6794:d:10.1038_35019055

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35019055

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().