deleterious mutation
Fry JD 2001 Rapid mutational declines of viability in Drosophila. Genet Res 77:53-60.
- Mukai and Ohnishi may have confounded viability declines caused by mutation with declines resulting from environmental changes or other extraneous factors
- I show that in each of four experiments, including Mukai's two experiments, viability declines due to mildly deleterious mutations were rapid
- the results give no support for the view that Mukai overestimated the declines
- variation is probably due to some combination of sampling error, strain differences and differences in assay conditions, rather than to failure to distinguish mutational and non-mutational viability changes
- U ≥ c [ΔM]2 / ΔV ... (1)
- when extrapolated to the entire genome, these results suggest a surprisingly fast decline of 1–2% per generation
- lower bounds for U (by (1), with c = 5) varied from 0⋅10 (Fry et al., 1999) to 0⋅85 (Mukai et al., 1972), with about half this variation being caused by variation in the DM estimates (summarized in Fry et al., 1999)
