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Originally published as Genetics Published Articles Ahead of Print on November 16, 2006.
Genetics, Vol. 175, 267-275, January 2007, Copyright © 2007
doi:10.1534/genetics.106.066142
Accumulation of Deleterious Mutations in Small Abiotic Populations of RNA
Steven J. Soll1, Carolina Díaz Arenas and Niles Lehman2
Department of Chemistry, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon 97207
2 Corresponding author: Department of Chemistry, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR 97207.
E-mail: niles{at}pdx.edu
The accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations in populations leads to the buildup of a genetic load and can cause the extinction of populations of small size. Mutation-accumulation experiments have been used to study this process in a wide variety of organisms, yet the exact mutational underpinnings of genetic loads and their fitness consequences remain poorly characterized. Here, we use an abiotic system of RNA populations evolving continuously in vitro to examine the molecular events that can instigate a genetic load. By tracking the fitness decline of ligase ribozyme populations with bottleneck sizes between 100 and 3000 molecules, we detected the appearance and subsequent fixation of both slightly deleterious mutations and advantageous mutations. Smaller populations went extinct in significantly fewer generations than did larger ones, supporting the notion of a mutational meltdown. These data suggest that mutation accumulation was an important evolutionary force in the prebiotic RNA world and that mechanisms such as recombination to ameliorate genetic loads may have been in place early in the history of life.
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