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Gen2ege - Lecture 9

This lecture discusses key concepts of natural selection including how it acts to maintain or reduce genetic variation within and between populations. It defines natural selection as variations that provide a survival or reproductive advantage being inherited more by offspring, as described by Charles Darwin. Selection compares phenotypes and selects those that maximize fitness, altering genotype frequencies over generations. Relative fitness is a local measure comparing genotypes' performance, with a fitness of 1 assigned to the standard genotype and selection coefficients quantifying differences from this. Dominance relationships between alleles also impact their visibility to selection and ability to persist in a population. Selection can decrease genetic variation by favoring or disfavoring particular alleles.

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39 views

Gen2ege - Lecture 9

This lecture discusses key concepts of natural selection including how it acts to maintain or reduce genetic variation within and between populations. It defines natural selection as variations that provide a survival or reproductive advantage being inherited more by offspring, as described by Charles Darwin. Selection compares phenotypes and selects those that maximize fitness, altering genotype frequencies over generations. Relative fitness is a local measure comparing genotypes' performance, with a fitness of 1 assigned to the standard genotype and selection coefficients quantifying differences from this. Dominance relationships between alleles also impact their visibility to selection and ability to persist in a population. Selection can decrease genetic variation by favoring or disfavoring particular alleles.

Uploaded by

Bella Swan
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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GEN2EGE – Lecture 9

- Selection can act as either to maintain or to reduce genetic variation


within a population and to either increase, decrease or maintain genetic
differences between populations
- What is natural selection?
“Owing to this struggle for life, variations, however slight, if they be in
any degree profitable to the individuals in a species, in their infinitely
complex relations to other organic beings and to their physical conditions
of life, will tend to the preservation of such individuals, and will
generally be inherited by their offspring -> Charles Darwin
- In all species, more offspring are produced than can survive & reproduce
- Individuals differ in their ability to survive and reproduce, at least in part
due to genotype
- Genotypes that facilitate survival will be more likely to be successful at
the reproductive stage & thus contribute disproportionately to the next
generation...
- An aside about selection...
*there are two “flavours” of selection that will consider
*first, genotypic view... that allows a description of the process and
outcome in terms of genotypes and alleles
*however, selection acts on phenotypes, so we must also understand
the links between genotypes and phenotypes
- Natural Selection
*is unlike mutation, drift & migration...
*in population genetic terms, any genetic change over time is
evolution, including drift and migration (i.e. evolution is NOT just
selection)
*but adaptive change occurs only by natural selection
*natural selection takes genetic variation and moulds it to produce
adaptive change
*acts to retain, or eliminate variants
*thus, natural selection changes genotype frequencies (and, indirectly,
allele frequencies)
*changes in genotypes may be up or down
- Fitness
*fitness is a property of a phenotype, and selection acts to compare
phenotypes and select the phenotype that maximises fitness
*population genetics is concerned with the way in which selection
alters genotype frequencies in a population
*some genotypes confer phenotypes that are fitter than others – they
have advantages in aspects of performance such that they are
expected to leave more descendants in future generations (compared
to competing genotypes)
- Relative Fitness
*but natural selection compares genotypes, so we need a relative
measure e.g. faster, bigger, more fecund in comparison with others
in
the population at that particular time and place
*this means that fitness is a local measure that applies in one place at
one time
*what is fit in one population or time may be less fit in another
population or time
*w is usually used to denote relative fitness
*the relative fitness of the genotype chosen as the standard is
arbitrarily assigned as 1, then...
*selection coefficient, s, is the strength of selection against a
genotype = 1 – w
*no selection, w = 1 and s = 0
*NOTE: you can simply reverse the sign and use selection for a
genotype
- Fitness and [genetic] dominance
*suppose:
A1 A 1 genotype →10 bristles on fly A2 A 2 genotype → 0 bristles on fly *what
A A
will 1 2give?
*Depends on if A1 is dominant to A2, or if A1 is only as ‘powerful’ as
A2 (addictive/incomplete dominance), or recessive relative to A2
-

-
- Dominance and Selection
*here we are talking about dominance in terms of relative fitness of
genotypes
*harmful or deleterious alleles are usually recessive (usually loss-of
function), so the heterozygote has the same relative fitness as the
(dominant) homozygote
*this means that when harmful alleles are rare, hence mostly present
in heterozygotes, they are not “visible” to selection
*thus, even lethal alleles can persist in a population at low frequency
-

- To Summarise
*we define relative fitness by comparing the (selection) fitness of
alternative genotypes
*alleles then can be defined as dominant, recessive or somewhere in
between depending on the relative fitness of different genotypes
(combinations of alleles)
*in this sense, dominance relationships (with respect to fitness) are
measured in terms of relative fitness of different genotypes
- Selection that decreases variation
*directional selection for allele
*purifying selection against allele
*unconditional directional selection on alleles will tend -> fixation or
extinction
*directional selection is probably the most familiar intuitively since it
brings about the change e.g. bigger beaks in Darwin’s finches

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