ISSN: 2048-9145

Pharmaceutical Bioprocessing

Frequency-dependent Selection Review Articles

Frequency dependent selection occurs when the fitness of a genotype or phenotype in a population is related to its frequency in the population (Ayala and Campbell, 1974). Positive frequency dependent selection occurs when the more common a variant is in a population, the higher its fitness, while negative frequency dependent selection occurs when a variant has higher fitness the less common it is. Positive frequency dependent selection therefore tends to eliminate variation from populations, while negative frequency dependent selection acts to retain polymorphism. It is this latter effect that may contribute to speciation through a form of frequency dependent ecological selection that has been termed “adaptive dynamics” (Waxman and Gavrilets, 2005; Sinervo and Calsbeek, 2006). In this case, competition can generate frequency dependent selection that favors individuals that utilize different parts of a shared resource distribution. As a result, two populations can diverge and ecologically displace one another, generating RI, as hybrids with intermediate phenotypes/genotypes will be less fit as they will occupy a part of resource space that will be overused (Linn et al., 2003; Schluter, 2003; Gavrilets, 2004). Competitive speciation in an adaptive dynamics frequency dependent framework is a process requiring spatial overlap of populations and, thus, leads to divergence in the context of sympatric or parapatric geographic distributions of populations.    

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