Purging Deleterious Mutations under Self Fertilization: Paradoxical Recovery in Fitness with Increasing Mutation Rate in Caenorhabditis elegans

Abstract

Compensatory mutations can be more frequent under high mutation rates and may alleviate a portion of the fitness lost due to the accumulation of deleterious mutations through epistatic interactions with deleterious mutations. The prolonged maintenance of tightly linked compensatory and deleterious mutations facilitated by self-fertilization may be responsible for the fitness increase as linkage disequilibrium between the compensatory and deleterious mutations preserves their epistatic interaction.