ArticleNature communications2017
Evolution of drift robustness in small populations.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Investigating zeta-cypermethrin resistance stability in California Drosophila suzukii populations.Pest management science · 2026Article
- The hidden threat: genetic load dynamics in tetraploids and diploids.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Macroevolution along developmental lines of least resistance in fly wings.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Genomic divergence and mutation load in thePlant diversity · 2024Article
- Self-replicating artificial neural networks give rise to universal evolutionary dynamics.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Developmental bias predicts 60 million years of wing shape evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Modelling speciation: Problems and implications.In silico biology · 2023Article
- Low protein expression enhances phenotypic evolvability by intensifying selection on folding stability.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Characterizing viral within-host diversity in fast and non-equilibrium demo-genetic dynamics.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Why are viral genomes so fragile? The bottleneck hypothesis.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Universal Constraints on Protein Evolution in the Long-Term Evolution Experiment with Escherichia coli.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Changes in Cell Size and Shape during 50,000 Generations of Experimental Evolution with Escherichia coli.Journal of bacteriology · 2021Article
- An interplay of resource availability, population size and mutation rate potentiates the evolution of metabolic signaling.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- A comparative analysis of SLA-DRB1 genetic diversity in Colombian (creoles and commercial line) and worldwide swine populations.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Moderate Amounts of Epistasis are Not Evolutionarily Stable in Small Populations.Journal of molecular evolution · 2020Article
- Evolution of Epistasis: Small Populations Go Their Separate Ways.Journal of molecular evolution · 2020Article
- Cell-line specific RNA editing patterns in Trypanosoma brucei suggest a unique mechanism to generate protein variation in a system intolerant to genetic mutations.Nucleic acids research · 2020Article
- Adapting the engine to the fuel: mutator populations can reduce the mutational load by reorganizing their genome structure.BMC evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most mutations are deleterious and cause a reduction in population fitness known as the mutational load. In small populations, weakened selection against slightly-deleterious mutations results in an additional fitness reduction. Many studies have established that populations can evolve a reduced mutational load by evolving mutational robustness, but it is uncertain whether small populations can evolve a reduced susceptibility to drift-related fitness declines. Here, using mathematical modeling and digital experimental evolution, we show that small populations do evolve a reduced vulnerability to drift, or 'drift robustness'. We find that, compared to genotypes from large populations, genotypes from small populations have a decreased likelihood of small-effect deleterious mutations, thus causing small-population genotypes to be drift-robust. We further show that drift robustness is not adaptive, but instead arises because small populations can only maintain fitness on drift-robust fitness peaks. These results have implications for genome evolution in organisms with small effective population sizes.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.