Genetic diversity is essential to the survival of a species. It's easy enough to maintain if a species reproduces sexually; an egg and a sperm combine genetic material from two creatures into one, forming a genomically robust ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 16, 2024
0
240
The first Neanderthal draft genome was published in 2010. Since then, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have sequenced a further 18 genomes from 14 different archaeological sites throughout ...
Archaeology
Oct 19, 2022
2
1460
Climate change and habitat destruction may have already caused the loss of more than one-tenth of the world's terrestrial genetic diversity, according to new research led by Carnegie's Moises Exposito-Alonso and published ...
Ecology
Sep 22, 2022
0
168
In the evolutionary arms race between rattlesnakes and their prey, rodents, birds and other reptiles develop resistance to the snakes' deadly venom to survive. But new research led by the University of Colorado Boulder and ...
Evolution
Jul 18, 2022
0
81
An international team led by The University of Vienna and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in collaboration with the National Museum of Korea has successfully sequenced and studied the whole genome of ...
Archaeology
Jun 21, 2022
0
395
The vaquita porpoise, the world's smallest marine mammal, is on the brink of extinction, with 10 or fewer still living in Mexico's Gulf of California, their sole habitat. But a genetic analysis by a team of UCLA biologists ...
Plants & Animals
May 5, 2022
0
430
Watching paint dry has nothing on watching a forest grow.
Ecology
Sep 6, 2021
0
195
There's been an age-old question going back to Darwin's time about the relationships among the world's five living rhinoceros species. One reason answers have been hard to come by is that most rhinos went extinct before the ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 24, 2021
0
1767
Tropical regions contain many of the world's species and scientists consider them hotspots due to their immense biological diversity. However, due to limited sampling our knowledge of tropical diversity remains incomplete, ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 10, 2020
0
136
New research suggests that American mastodons were avid travelers, migrating vast distances across North America in response to dramatic climate change during the ice ages of the Pleistocene. The study, conducted by an international ...
Archaeology
Sep 1, 2020
2
622
Genetic diversity is a level of biodiversity that refers to the total number of genetic characteristics in the genetic makeup of a species. It is distinguished from genetic variability, which describes the tendency of genetic characteristics to vary.
The academic field of population genetics includes several hypotheses and theories regarding genetic diversity. The neutral theory of evolution proposes that diversity is the result of the accumulation of neutral substitutions. Diversifying selection is the hypothesis that two subpopulations of a species live in different environments that select for different alleles at a particular locus. This may occur, for instance, if a species has a large range relative to the mobility of individuals within it. Frequency-dependent selection is the hypothesis that as alleles become more common, they become less fit. This is often invoked in host-pathogen interactions, where a high frequency of a defensive allele among the host means that it is more likely that a pathogen will spread if it is able to overcome that allele.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
