Mutation accumulation in selfing populations under fluctuating selection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Selfing species are prone to extinction, possibly because highly selfing populations can suffer from a continuous accumulation of deleterious mutations, a process analogous to Muller's ratchet in asexual populations. However, current theory provides little insight into which types of genes are most likely to accumulate deleterious alleles and what environmental circumstances may accelerate genomic degradation. Here, we investigate temporal changes in the environment that cause fluctuations in the strength of purifying selection. We simulate selfing populations with genomes containing a mixture of loci experiencing constant selection and loci experiencing selection that fluctuates in strength (but not direction). Even when both types of loci experience the same average strength of selection, loci under fluctuating selection contribute disproportionately more to deleterious mutation accumulation. Moreover, the presence of loci experiencing fluctuating selection in the genome increases the deleterious fixation rate at loci under constant selection; under most realistic scenarios, this effect of linked selection can be attributed to a reduction in Ne. Fluctuating selection is particularly injurious when selective environments are strongly autocorrelated over time and when selection is concentrated into rare bouts of strong selection. These results imply that loci under fluctuating selection are likely important drivers of extinction in selfing species.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".