ACCUMULATION OF DELETERIOUS GENES IN A CAGE POPULATION OF DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER

Won Ho Lee ¹ and Takao K. Watanabe ¹

¹ National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, 411 Japan

Lethal and sterility mutations were accumulated in a cage population which was initiated with lethal- and sterility-free second chromosomes of D. melanogaster. It took about 2,000 days for the frequencies of these genes to reach equilibrium levels, i.e., 18% lethal and 9% male-sterile chromosomes. Two other cage populations which were initiated with random chromosomes sampled from natural populations and kept for more than eleven years in the laboratory showed 19–20% lethal content. The elimination rates of lethals by homozygosis in these populations were smaller than the mutation rate. By using Nei's formulae, the deleterious effect of a lethal gene in heterozygous condition (h) was estimated to be 0.035. The effective population number in the cage populations was estimated to be 1,000–2,900, while the actual population number was 3,500–7,800.