scholarly journals EFFECTS OF POPULATION SIZE AND SELECTION INTENSITY ON CORRELATED RESPONSES TO SELECTION FOR POSTWEANING GAIN IN MICE

Genetics ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
E J Eisen ◽  
J P Hanrahan ◽  
J E Legates

ABSTRACT Correlated responses to selection for postweaning gain in mice were studied to determine the influence of population size and selection intensity. Correlated traits measured were three-, six- and eight-week body weights, litter size, twelve-day litter weight, proportion infertile matings and two indexes of reproductive performance. In general, the results agreed with observations made on direct response: correlated responses in the body weight traits and litter size increased as (1) selection intensity increased and (2) effective population size increased. Correlated responses in the body weight traits and litter size were positive in the large population size lines (16 pairs), as expected from the positive genetic correlation between these traits and postweaning gain. However, several negative correlated responses were observed at small population sizes (one and two pairs). Within each level of selection intensity, traits generally associated with fitness tended to decline most in the very small populations (one and two pairs) and in the large populations (16 pairs) for apparently different reasons. The fitness decline at the small effective population sizes was attributable to inbreeding depression. In contrast, it was postulated that the fitness decline at the large effective population size was due to selection moving the population mean for body weight and a trait positively correlated genetically with body weight (i.e., percent body fat) away from an optimum

Genetics ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-530
Author(s):  
J P Hanrahan ◽  
E J Eisen ◽  
J E Legates

ABSTRACT The effects of population size and selection intensity on the mean response was examined after 14 generations of within full-sib family selection for postweaning gain in mice. Population sizes of 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 pair matings were each evaluated at selection intensities of 100% (control), 50% and 25% in a replicated experiment. Selection response per generation increased as selection intensity increased. Selection response and realized heritability tended to increase with increasing population size. Replicate variability in realized heritability was large at population sizes of 1, 2 and 4 pairs. Genetic drift was implicated as the primary factor causing the reduced response and lowered repeatability at the smaller population sizes. Lines with intended effective population sizes of 62 yielded larger selection responses per unit selection differential than lines with effective population sizes of 30 or less.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 2441-2449
Author(s):  
Jennifer James ◽  
Adam Eyre-Walker

Abstract What determines the level of genetic diversity of a species remains one of the enduring problems of population genetics. Because neutral diversity depends upon the product of the effective population size and mutation rate, there is an expectation that diversity should be correlated to measures of census population size. This correlation is often observed for nuclear but not for mitochondrial DNA. Here, we revisit the question of whether mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity is correlated to census population size by compiling the largest data set to date, using 639 mammalian species. In a multiple regression, we find that nucleotide diversity is significantly correlated to both range size and mass-specific metabolic rate, but not a variety of other factors. We also find that a measure of the effective population size, the ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous diversity, is also significantly negatively correlated to both range size and mass-specific metabolic rate. These results together suggest that species with larger ranges have larger effective population sizes. The slope of the relationship between diversity and range is such that doubling the range increases diversity by 12–20%, providing one of the first quantifications of the relationship between diversity and the census population size.


1994 ◽  
Vol 72 (5) ◽  
pp. 1126-1137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabrielle Lagerkvist ◽  
K. Johansson ◽  
N. Lundeheim

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Elise Lauterbur

AbstractPopulation genetics employs two major models for conceptualizing genetic relationships among individuals – outcome-driven (coalescent) and process-driven (forward). These models are complementary, but the basic Kingman coalescent and its extensions make fundamental assumptions to allow analytical approximations: a constant effective population size much larger than the sample size. These make the probability of multiple coalescent events per generation negligible. Although these assumptions are often violated in species of conservation concern, conservation genetics often uses coalescent models of effective population sizes and trajectories in endangered species. Despite this, the effect of very small effective population sizes, and their interaction with bottlenecks and sample sizes, on such analyses of genetic diversity remains unexplored. Here, I use simulations to analyze the influence of small effective population size, population decline, and their relationship with sample size, on coalescent-based estimates of genetic diversity. Compared to forward process-based estimates, coalescent models significantly overestimate genetic diversity in oversampled populations with very small effective sizes. When sampled soon after a decline, coalescent models overestimate genetic diversity in small populations regardless of sample size. Such overestimates artificially inflate estimates of both bottleneck and population split times. For conservation applications with small effective population sizes, forward simulations that do not make population size assumptions are computationally tractable and should be considered instead of coalescent-based models. These findings underscore the importance of the theoretical basis of analytical techniques as applied to conservation questions.


Sociobiology ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Kaori Murase ◽  
Masaharu Fukita

Although many people have been paying attention to the decrease of biodiversity on earth in recent years, many local people, even staff of national parks, live under limiting conditions (such as a shortage of funds, specialists, literature, equipment for experiments and so on). To conserve biodiversity, it is important to be clear about which species decrease or increase. To find such information, it is quite important to know the dynamics of effective population size for each species. Although a large number of papers have been written about how to improve the precision of the estimated effective population size, little has been studied on how to estimate the dynamics of the effective population sizes for many species together under limiting situations, very similar to the management methods of national parks in countries which have biological hot spots. In this paper, we are not concerned with the improvement of the precision of the estimates. We do, however, propose a simple method for the estimation of the effective population size. We named it the “MMR method.” It is not difficult to understand and is easily applied to many species. To show the usefulness of the MMR method we made simple virtual species, which included the first generation and the second generation, on a computer, and then we conducted simulations to estimate the effective population size of the first generation. We calculated three statistics to estimate whether the MMR method is useful or not. The three statistics showed that the MMR method is useful.


Genetics ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 104 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-548
Author(s):  
Edward Pollak

ABSTRACT A new procedure is proposed for estimating the effective population size, given that information is available on changes in frequencies of the alleles at one or more independently segregating loci and the population is observed at two or more separate times. Approximate expressions are obtained for the variances of the new statistic, as well as others, also based on allele frequency changes, that have been discussed in the literature. This analysis indicates that the new statistic will generally have a smaller variance than the others. Estimates of effective population sizes and of the standard errors of the estimates are computed for data on two fly populations that have been discussed in earlier papers. In both cases, there is evidence that the effective population size is very much smaller than the minimum census size of the population.


Genetics ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 163 (1) ◽  
pp. 395-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey D Wall

Abstract This article presents a new method for jointly estimating species divergence times and ancestral population sizes. The method improves on previous ones by explicitly incorporating intragenic recombination, by utilizing orthologous sequence data from closely related species, and by using a maximum-likelihood framework. The latter allows for efficient use of the available information and provides a way of assessing how much confidence we should place in the estimates. I apply the method to recently collected intergenic sequence data from humans and the great apes. The results suggest that the human-chimpanzee ancestral population size was four to seven times larger than the current human effective population size and that the current human effective population size is slightly >10,000. These estimates are similar to previous ones, and they appear relatively insensitive to assumptions about the recombination rates or mutation rates across loci.


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