deleterious mutation

Chavarrías D, López-Fanjul C & García-Dorado A 2001 The rate of mutation and the homozygous and heterozygous mutational effects for competitive viability: a long-term experiment with Drosophila melanogaster. Genetics 158:681-693.

• the rate of decline in mean ΔM = 0.1% was small
• that of increase in variance ΔV ≈ 0.08 × 10^{− 3} was similar to the values obtained in previous experiments when severely deleterious mutations were excluded
• the corresponding estimates of the mutation rate λ ≥ 0.01 and the average effect of mutations E(s) ≤ 0.08 are in good agreement with Bateman-Mukai and minimum distance estimates for noncompetitive viability obtained from the same MA lines after 105 generations
• thus, competitive and noncompetitive viability show similar mutational properties
• the regression estimate of the degree of dominance for mild-to-moderate deleterious mutations was ~0.3
• suggesting that the pertinent value for new unselected mutations should be somewhat smaller