ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Mutation accumulation opposes polymorphism: supergenes and the curious case of balanced lethals.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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13 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Molecular Evolution of a Sex-Linked Inversion Polymorphism in Zebra Finches.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Structural variation in context: mechanisms, functions and selection regimes across the tree of life.Heredity · 2026Article
- Putting Structural Variants Into Practice: The Role of Chromosomal Inversions in the Management of Marine Environments.Molecular ecology · 2025Review
- Identification of Y-chromosome Turnover in Newts Fails to Support a Sex Chromosome Origin for the Triturus Balanced Lethal System.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Interplay between large low-recombining regions and pseudo-overdominance in a plant genome.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Determining Zygosity With Multiplex Kompetitive Allele-Specific PCR (mxKASP) Genotyping.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Exposing Selection and Genetic Linkage in the Evolutionary Enigmatic Balanced Lethal System inEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- The long and short of hyperdivergent regions.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2025Review
- An Inversion Polymorphism Under Balancing Selection, Involving Giant Mobile Elements, in an Invasive Fungal Pathogen.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Locally adaptive inversions in structured populations.Genetics · 2024Article
- Inversions and parallel evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Genomic architecture of supergenes: connecting form and function.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Unbalanced selection: the challenge of maintaining a social polymorphism when a supergene is selfish.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Supergenes offer spectacular examples of long-term balancing selection in nature, but their origin and maintenance remain a mystery. Reduced recombination between arrangements, a critical aspect of many supergenes, protects adaptive multi-trait phenotypes but can lead to mutation accumulation. Mutation accumulation can stabilize the system through the emergence of associative overdominance (AOD), destabilize the system, or lead to new evolutionary outcomes. One outcome is the formation of maladaptive balanced lethal systems, where only heterozygotes remain viable and reproduce. We investigated the conditions under which these different outcomes occur, assuming a scenario of introgression after divergence. We found that AOD aided the invasion of a new supergene arrangement and the establishment of a polymorphism. However, this polymorphism was easily destabilized by further mutation accumulation, which was often asymmetric, disrupting the quasi-equilibrium state. Mechanisms that accelerated degeneration tended to amplify asymmetric mutation accumulation between the supergene arrangements and vice-versa. As the evolution of balanced lethal systems requires symmetric degeneration of both arrangements, this leaves only restricted conditions for their evolution, namely small population sizes and low rates of gene conversion. The dichotomy between the persistence of polymorphism and degeneration of supergene arrangements likely underlies the rarity of balanced lethal systems in nature. This article is part of the theme issue 'Genomic architecture of supergenes: causes and evolutionary consequences'.
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