Journal
JOURNAL OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
Volume 29, Issue 4, Pages 857-864Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/jeb.12815
Keywords
dominance-by-dominance epistasis; inbreeding depression; mating system
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Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada)
- AFA (Discovery Grant)
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Genetic interactions can play an important role in the evolution of reproductive strategies. In particular, negative dominance-by-dominance epistasis for fitness can theoretically favour sex and recombination. This form of epistasis can be detected statistically because it generates nonlinearity in the relationship between fitness and inbreeding coefficient. Measures of fitness in progressively inbred lines tend to show limited evidence for epistasis. However, tests of this kind can be biased against detecting an accelerating decline due to line losses at higher inbreeding levels. We tested for dominance-by-dominance epistasis in Drosophila melanogaster by examining viability at five inbreeding levels that were generated simultaneously, avoiding the bias against detecting nonlinearity that has affected previous studies. We find an accelerating rate of fitness decline with inbreeding, indicating that dominance-by-dominance epistasis is negative on average, which should favour sex and recombination.
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