The phrase "are selected against" is correct and usable in written English.
It is typically used in the context of evolutionary biology or genetics to describe traits or individuals that are less likely to survive or reproduce due to certain disadvantages.
Example: "In harsh environments, certain traits are selected against, leading to a decrease in their frequency in the population over time."
Alternatives: "are disadvantaged" or "face selection pressure".
When individuals with intermediate phenotypes are favoured and extreme phenotypes are selected against, the selection is said to be stabilizing.
Under purifying selection, deviations from the functional phenotype are selected against, and amino acid replacements resulting from non-synonymous substitutions are rare relative to synonymous substitutions (K a /K s < 1).
In contrast, recently described Designed Ankyrin Repeat Proteins (DARPins) are immunologically silent, have superior stability and can be cheaply produced in prokaryotic systems, while maintaining high selectivity and affinity for the target that they are selected against [3], [4].
These divergent selective forces within breeds are a form of disruptive selection: extreme forms are favored while intermediate forms are selected against [ 18].
This selection scenario is expected to cause cyclic selection, driving rare alleles to relatively high frequency before they are selected against [ 22].
Specifically, as viral replication increases, increasing co-infection effectively decreases the pace at which lower fitness mutants are selected against and, therefore, the capacity for high fitness variants to experience selective sweeps.
That is, only few amino-acid mutations with a relatively small range of negative selection coefficients cause weak background selection in D. melanogaster, while the majority of deleterious amino-acid mutations are selected against effectively.
We therefore evaluated the growth of the wild type and the mutant strains in the YPEG medium (3% ethanol, 3% glycerol), where only respiration competent cells are able to grow, while respiration defective cells are selected against.
Recent work has demonstrated that K. kingae expresses type IV pili that mediate adherence to respiratory epithelial and synovial cells and are selected against during invasive disease.
In this case, mutations that cause deviation away from the current form are selected against, with the net effect of preventing further change.
Most loss of function mutations are selected against.
