Fitness decline in spontaneous mutation accumulation lines ofCaenorhabditis eleganswith varying effective population sizes

• DOI: 10.1111/evo.12554
• Publication Date: 2014-10-22T10:13:02Z
• Authors: Vaishali Katju; Lucille B. Packard; Lijing Bu; Peter D. Keightley; Ulfar Bergthorsson
• Keywords: Experimental Evolution; Effective population size; Mutation Accumulation; Genetic Fitness

The rate and fitness effects of new mutations have been investigated by mutation accumulation (MA) experiments in which organisms are maintained at a constant minimal population size to facilitate the with efficacy selection. We evolved 35 MA lines Caenorhabditis elegans parallel for 409 generations three sizes (N = 1, 10, 100), representing first spontaneous long‐term experiment varying corresponding differences Productivity survivorship N 1 declined 44% 12%, respectively. average deleterious estimated be 16.4% productivity 11.8% survivorship. Larger populations 10 100) did not suffer significant decline traits despite lengthy sustained regime consecutive bottlenecks exceeding 400 generations. Together, these results suggest that very small is dominated large effects. It possible larger contain load cryptic moderate would revealed more challenging environments.