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Updated: Jun 5, 2026

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations
Published on: February 3, 2023
Haplotype complementarity under mutational pressure
Dietrich Stauffer1, Stanislaw Cebrat
1Institute for Theoretical Physics, Cologne University, D-50923 Koln, Euroland.
Abstract:
Natural populations do not correspond to Mendelian populations. Effective populations are much smaller, inbreeding higher, and organization of large number of genes into chromosomes connected with relatively low recombination rate invalidates the law of independent gene assortment. Under such conditions, a large number of genes is inherited as clusters and evolves as genetic units. Computer simulations have shown that mutations inside clusters are not eliminated independently by purifying selection but, instead, the whole clusters tend to complement each other. It means that whenever one haplotype carries one of two possible alleles, the other haplotype at that locus carries the other allele; thus inherited recessive deleterious diseases do not affect the health of the phenotype even if their fraction in the genome is high. This complementation seems to be a winning strategy in small or spatially distributed populations. We discuss possible consequences of this complementarity.
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