Third, the observed inbreeding depression could be the resulting equilibrium between purging in the haploid males and a high deleterious mutation accumulation during the asexual generations.
The usefulness of this restriction depends, however, on the ability to differentially suppress changes in loci with high deleterious potential.
High deleterious mutation, small N and small- to intermediate-size duplication events are favorable conditions for the variant to spread.
Therefore, when the cost is high, deleterious mutations are purged from the population more effectively with FAD than with UNI.
Recent work has demonstrated an extraordinary degree of selfing combined with a high deleterious mutation rate in contemporary populations.
Achieving this for genetic changes requires functional separation of the genome into readily changing elements with relatively low deleterious potential and rarely changing elements with high deleterious potential.
These results suggested that males are beneficial to ensure frequent outcrossing, which is favored under variable environmental conditions and/or high deleterious mutation rates [ 17- 22].
In RNA viruses with a high deleterious mutation rate the majority of variants exhibit a replicative capacity lower than the mean [ 10- 12].
Our study raises the potential importance of haploid phase selection and high deleterious mutation rates on mutator success in sexually reproducing populations.
The removal of recurrent deleterious mutations from the population reduces the local effective population size, causing regions with higher deleterious mutation rates (or lower recombination rates) to harbour reduced levels of neutral diversity; i.e. background selection [ 54, 55].
