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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 24, 2026

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations

Published on: February 3, 2023

Deleterious passengers in adapting populations.

Benjamin H Good¹, Michael M Desai²

¹Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Department of Physics, and FAS Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

|September 7, 2014

Summary

Beneficial mutations during adaptation can impede the removal of harmful mutations, impacting genome evolution. This study quantifies these interactions to predict which deleterious mutations may fix and slow down adaptation.

Keywords:

adaptation genetic load hitchhiking

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Area of Science:

Evolutionary genetics
Population genetics
Genomics

Background:

Most new mutations are deleterious and removed by natural selection.
Beneficial mutations can influence the evolutionary fate of linked deleterious mutations.
Understanding these interactions is crucial for comprehending adaptation dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

To analyze the interplay between beneficial driver mutations and linked deleterious passenger mutations during adaptation.
To derive analytical expressions for the substitution rate of deleterious mutations and the impact on beneficial mutation rates.
To quantify the dependence of these rates on population size and adaptation rate.

Main Methods:

Development of analytical models to describe the interactions between beneficial and deleterious mutations.
Mathematical derivation of substitution rates for both beneficial and deleterious variants.
Analysis of the influence of population size, mutation rate, and fitness costs on evolutionary trajectories.

Main Results:

The fixation probability of deleterious mutations is highly sensitive to the rate and spectrum of beneficial mutations.
The rate of beneficial substitutions can be reduced by the genetic load imposed by linked deleterious mutations.
Deleterious substitution rates exhibit a non-monotonic dependence on population size and adaptation rate.

Conclusions:

The dynamics of adaptation are significantly shaped by the co-occurrence of beneficial and deleterious mutations.
The study provides a framework for predicting which deleterious mutations are likely to fix during adaptation.
Results highlight the potential for deleterious mutations to limit the pace of adaptive evolution.