Deleterious Mutations

Conservation Genetics - Techniques
... In plants, the mitochondrial DNA has very high rates of structural mutations, so is rarely used for genetic markers, as the chloroplast genome can be used instead ... Other sites in the genome that are subject to high mutation rates such as the Major Histocompatibility Complex, and the microsatellites and minisatellites are ... Deleterious alleles arise through mutation, however certain recessive ones can become more prevalent due to inbreeding ...

History Of Molecular Evolution - The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution - The Neutralist-selectionist Debate and Near-neutrality
... only cause of evolution, even at the molecular level, while neutralists held that neutral mutations were widespread and that genetic drift was a crucial factor in the evolution of proteins ... his arguments on the rate at which drift could fix new mutations in finite populations, the significance of constant protein evolution rates, and the functional constraints on protein ... predicting high genetic load as a consequence of non-neutral mutations), he gradually deemphasized his original argument that segregational load would be impossibly high ...

Mutational Meltdown
... by which a small population accumulates harmful mutations, which leads to loss of fitness and decline of the population size, which may lead to further accumulation of deleterious mutations due to inbreeding depression ... Usually, the deleterious mutations would simply be selected away, but during mutational meltdown, the number of individuals thus suffering an early death is too large relative to overall population ... The accumulation of mutations in small populations can be divided into three phases ...

Nearly Neutral Theory Of Molecular Evolution
... theory of molecular evolution that accounts for slightly advantageous or deleterious mutations at the molecular level ... by Tomoko Ohta in 1973 (including only deleterious mutations) and expanded in the early 1990s to include both advantageous and deleterious nearly neutral mutations ... Kimura's original neutral theory—which dealt only with mutations unaffected by natural selection—the nearly neutral theory predicts a relationship between population size and the rate of molecular ...