The Impact of Lethal Recessive Alleles on Bottlenecks with Implications for Conservation Genetics

Abstract

When a bottleneck occurs, lethal recessive alleles from the ancestral population provide a genetic load. The purging of lethal recessive mutations may prolong the bottleneck, or even cause the population to become extinct. But the purging is of short duration, it will be over before near neutral deleterious alleles accumulate. Lethal recessive alleles from the parental population and near neutral deleterious mutations which occur during a bottleneck are temporally separated threats to the survival of a population. Breeding individuals from a large population into a small endangered population will provide the benefit of viable alleles to replace near neutral deleterious alleles but also the cost of lethal recessive mutations from the large population.