A New Estimate of Genetic Load from Inbreeding Data

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Summary: Inbreeding effect revealed as mortality and morbidity in general may be ascribed to deleterious mutations generally present at different loci of the ancestors common to each consanguineous mating. A new coefficient (E) is suggested to measure this effect. On the basis of this theory, a new method to estimate the load of mutations disclosed by inbreeding has been presented elsewhere, and is now extended. In this method, the load is estimated without introducing gene frequency notions. Genetic loads estimated through our method are in rather close agreement to those estimated through the classical theory of Morton, Crow and Muller (MCM).