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By analogy, the term is used in human reproduction, but more commonly refers to the genetic disorders and other consequences that may arise from expression of deleterious recessive traits resulting from incestuous sexual relationships and consanguinity. Animals avoid inbreeding only rarely.
Inbreeding depression is the reduced biological fitness that has the potential to result from inbreeding, the breeding of related individuals. The loss of genetic diversity that is seen due to inbreeding, results from small population size. [2] Biological fitness refers to an organism's ability to survive and perpetuate its genetic material.
Genetic purging is the increased pressure of natural selection against deleterious alleles prompted by inbreeding. [1]Purging occurs because deleterious alleles tend to be recessive, which means that they only express all their harmful effects when they are present in the two copies of the individual (i.e., in homozygosis).
The hypothesis states that inbreeding increases the amount of overall homozygosity—not just locally in the MHC, so an increase in genetic homozygosity may be accompanied not only by the expression of recessive diseases and mutations, but by the loss of any potential heterozygote advantage as well. [17] [2] Animals only rarely avoid inbreeding ...
First, inbreeding forces competition with relatives, which decreases the evolutionary fitness of the species. [4] Secondly, the decrease in genetic variability causes an increased possibility a lethal homozygous recessive trait may be expressed; this decreases the average litter size reproduced, indirectly decreasing the population. [ 5 ]
Inbreeding avoidance, or the inbreeding avoidance hypothesis, is a concept in evolutionary biology that refers to the prevention of the harmful effects of inbreeding. Animals only rarely exhibit inbreeding avoidance. [ 1 ]
Genetic drift can cause alleles to disappear from a population, and this lowers genetic diversity. In small populations, low genetic diversity can increase rates of inbreeding, which can result in inbreeding depression , in which a population made up of genetically similar individuals loses fitness .
In clinical genetics, consanguinity is defined as a union between two individuals who are related as second cousins or closer, with the inbreeding coefficient (F) equal or higher than 0.0156, where (F) represents the proportion of genetic loci at which the child of a consanguineous couple might inherit identical gene copies from both parents. [25]