ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
Heterozygote advantage as a natural consequence of adaptation in diploids.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 94 papers.
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Who cites it
94 citing papers in PubMed.
- Module-Selection Balance in the Evolution of Modular Organisms.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A century of theories of balancing selection.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
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- Effects of inbreeding on balancing selection: insights from Fisher's geometric model.Genetics · 2025Article
- The maintenance of genetic polymorphism underlying sexually antagonistic traits.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- The long and short of hyperdivergent regions.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2025Review
- Estimation of Inbreeding Depression From Overdominant Loci Using Molecular Markers.Evolutionary applications · 2025Article
- Reconciling theories of dominance with the relative rates of adaptive substitution on sex chromosomes and autosomes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Polymorphism and the Red Queen: the selective maintenance of allelic variation in a deteriorating environment.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Article
- Temporal challenges in detecting balancing selection from population genomic data.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Article
- Only rare classical MHC-I alleles are highly expressed in the European house sparrow.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- On the fast track: hybrids adapt more rapidly than parental populations in a novel environment.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- MassArray Genotyping as a Selection Tool for Extending the Shelf-Life of Fresh Gilthead Sea Bream and European Seabass.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Article
- Inferring Balancing Selection From Genome-Scale Data.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Review
- Tirap controls Mycobacterium tuberculosis phagosomal acidification.PLoS pathogens · 2023Article
- Deep Learning in Population Genetics.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Carry-over effects and fitness trade-offs in marine life histories: The costs of complexity for adaptation.Evolutionary applications · 2023Article
- Personality traits as mediators in the association betweenFrontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Adaptation in Outbred Sexual Yeast is Repeatable, Polygenic and Favors Rare Haplotypes.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
34 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Molecular adaptation is typically assumed to proceed by sequential fixation of beneficial mutations. In diploids, this picture presupposes that for most adaptive mutations, the homozygotes have a higher fitness than the heterozygotes. Here, we show that contrary to this expectation, a substantial proportion of adaptive mutations should display heterozygote advantage. This feature of adaptation in diploids emerges naturally from the primary importance of the fitness of heterozygotes for the invasion of new adaptive mutations. We formalize this result in the framework of Fisher's influential geometric model of adaptation. We find that in diploids, adaptation should often proceed through a succession of short-lived balanced states that maintain substantially higher levels of phenotypic and fitness variation in the population compared with classic adaptive walks. In fast-changing environments, this variation produces a diversity advantage that allows diploids to remain better adapted compared with haploids despite the disadvantage associated with the presence of unfit homozygotes. The short-lived balanced states arising during adaptive walks should be mostly invisible to current scans for long-term balancing selection. Instead, they should leave signatures of incomplete selective sweeps, which do appear to be common in many species. Our results also raise the possibility that balancing selection, as a natural consequence of frequent adaptation, might play a more prominent role among the forces maintaining genetic variation than is commonly recognized.
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