Inbreeding depresssion in small populations

What is it about?

Inbreeding depression is a major driver of mating system evolution and has critical implications for population viability. Theoretical and empirical attention has been paid to predicting how inbreeding depression varies with population size. Lower inbreeding depression is predicted in small populations at equilibrium, primarily due to higher inbreeding rates facilitating purging and/or fixation of deleterious alleles (drift load), but predictions at demographic and genetic disequilibrium are less clear. We demonstrate that inbreeding depression can vary widely across populations at disequilibrium despite similar population effective size and highlight that joint demographic and genetic dynamics are key to predicting patterns of genetic load in nonequilibrium systems.

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Why is it important?

Novel results based on both experimental results and modelling.