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In population genetics, the founder effect is the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger population. It was first fully outlined by Ernst Mayr in 1942, [ 1 ] using existing theoretical work by those such as Sewall Wright . [ 2 ]
Population bottleneck followed by recovery or extinction. A population bottleneck or genetic bottleneck is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events such as famines, earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, and droughts; or human activities such as genocide, speciocide, widespread violence or intentional culling.
Serial founder effects and past small population size (increasing the likelihood of genetic drift) may have had an important influence in neutral differences between populations. [citation needed] The second main cause of genetic variation is due to the high degree of neutrality of most mutations. A small, but significant number of genes appear ...
This correlation is influenced by several evolutionary processes, such as genetic drift, founder effect, bottleneck, genetic hitchhiking, meiotic drive, mutation, gene flow, inbreeding, natural selection, or the Wahlund effect, but it was originally designed to measure the amount of allelic fixation owing to genetic drift.
Another possible cause of genetic divergence is the bottleneck effect. The bottleneck effect is when an event, such as a natural disaster, causes a large portion of the population to die. By chance, certain genetic patterns will be overrepresented in the remaining population, which is similar to what happens with the founder effect. [4]
Population size is directly associated with amount of genetic drift, and is the underlying cause of effects like population bottlenecks and the founder effect. [1] Genetic drift is the major source of decrease of genetic diversity within populations which drives fixation and can potentially lead to speciation events.
This image shows how though successive generations random allele fluctuations, or genetic drift, can lead to the fixation or loss of certain alleles within a population. Similar to the bottleneck effect, the founder's effect can also cause allele fixation. The founder effect occurs when a small founding population is moved to a new area and ...
Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and among populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology.Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as adaptation, speciation, and population structure.