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On the expected relationship between inbreeding, fitness, and extinction

Abstract

We assessed the expected relationship between the level and the cost of inbreeding, measured either in terms of fitness, inbreeding depression or probability of extinction. First, we show that the assumption of frequent, slightly deleterious mutations do agree with observations and experiments, on the contrary to the assumption of few, moderately deleterious mutations. For the same inbreeding coefficient, populations can greatly differ in fitness according to the following: (i) population size; larger populations show higher fitness (ii) the history of population size; in a population that recovers after a bottleneck, higher inbreeding can lead to higher fitness and (iii) population demography; population growth rate and carrying capacity determine the relationship between inbreeding and extinction. With regards to the relationship between inbreeding depression and inbreeding coefficient, the population size that minimizes inbreeding depression depends on the level of inbreeding: inbreeding depression can even decrease when population size increases. It is therefore clear that to infer the costs of inbreeding, one must know both the history of inbreeding (e.g. past bottlenecks) and population demography.

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Correspondence to Konstantinos Theodorou.

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Theodorou, K., Couvet, D. On the expected relationship between inbreeding, fitness, and extinction. Genet Sel Evol 38, 371 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1186/1297-9686-38-4-371

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1297-9686-38-4-371

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