ArticleGenetics2000
The degeneration of asexual haploid populations and the speed of Muller's ratchet.
Article in Genetics, 2000. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 71 papers.
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Who cites it
71 citing papers in PubMed, 187 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Drivers of achiasmatic meiosis: sexual antagonism versus heteromorphy-dependent aneuploidy across sex-chromosome divergence.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2025Article
- On Rooting and Dating Viral Trees With a Changing Evolutionary Rate Following Host-Switching.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Recombination and transposition drive genomic structural variation potentially impacting life history traits in a host-generalist fungal plant pathogen.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Evidence for cryptic sex in parthenogenetic stick insects of the genusProceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Heterogeneity in viral populations increases the rate of deleterious mutation accumulation.Genetics · 2022Article
- Population genetics of clonally transmissible cancers.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- The extinction time under mutational meltdown driven by high mutation rates.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Invasions of an obligate asexual daphnid species support the nearly neutral theory.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Molecular signatures of resource competition: Clonal interference favors ecological diversification and can lead to incipient speciation.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2021Article
- mtDNA Heteroplasmy: Origin, Detection, Significance, and Evolutionary Consequences.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Genome expansion in early eukaryotes drove the transition from lateral gene transfer to meiotic sex.eLife · 2020Article
- Article
- High incidence of heteroplasmy in the mtDNA of a natural population of the spider crab Maja brachydactyla.PloS one · 2020Article
- Adapting the engine to the fuel: mutator populations can reduce the mutational load by reorganizing their genome structure.BMC evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Survival of the simplest in microbial evolution.Nature communications · 2019Article
- No signal of deleterious mutation accumulation in conserved gene sequences of extant asexual hexapods.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Role of recombination and faithfulness to partner in sex chromosome degeneration.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Evolution and inheritance of animal mitochondrial DNA: rules and exceptions.Journal of biological research (Thessalonike, Greece) · 2017Review
11 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The accumulation of deleterious mutations due to the process known as Muller's ratchet can lead to the degeneration of nonrecombining populations. We present an analytical approximation for the rate at which this process is expected to occur in a haploid population. The approximation is based on a diffusion equation and is valid when N exp(-u/s) >> 1, where N is the population size, u is the rate at which deleterious mutations occur, and s is the effect of each mutation on fitness. Simulation results are presented to show that the approximation estimates the rate of the process better than previous approximations for values of mutation rates and selection coefficients that are compatible with the biological data. Under certain conditions, the ratchet can turn at a biologically significant rate when the deterministic equilibrium number of individuals free of mutations is substantially >100. The relevance of this process for the degeneration of Y or neo-Y chromosomes is discussed.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.