Journal
AMERICAN NATURALIST
Volume 172, Issue 2, Pages 160-169Publisher
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1086/589460
Keywords
adaptation; beneficial mutation; extinction; probability of fixation
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Funding
- NIGMS NIH HHS [GM51932, R00 GM114714] Funding Source: Medline
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Theories of adaptation typically ignore the effect of environmental change on population size. But some environmental challenges-challenges to which populations must adapt-may depress absolute fitness below 1, causing populations to decline. Under this scenario, adaptation is a race; beneficial alleles that adapt a population to the new environment must sweep to high frequency before the population becomes extinct. We derive simple, though approximate, solutions to the probability of successful adaptation ( population survival) when adaptation involves new mutations, the standing genetic variation, or a mixture of the two. Our results show that adaptation to such environmental challenges can be difficult when relying on new mutations at one or a few loci, and populations will often decline to extinction.
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