THE EFFECT OF DIFFERENTIAL VIABILITY ON THE POPULATION DYNAMICS OF t ALLELES IN THE HOUSE MOUSE

The remarkable polymorphism at the T locus in natural populations of the house mouse, Mus musculus, has been shown by Dunn and his collaborators (Dunn, 1953, 1957, 1960; Dunn and Suckling, 1956) to be maintained by a balance between selection and an abnormal segregation mechanism. Homozygotes for various mutant alleles (designated as tw) found in wild populations are either unconditional lethals or male sterile. The effective sperm pool of heterozygous males, however, contains between 85% and 99% t bearing sperm so that the loss of the mutant t alleles in homozygotes is counter-balanced by their increase from the segregation in heterozygous males. Bruck (1957) and Dunn and Levene (1961) gave the theoretical equilibrium frequency of mutant t alleles for the lethal and male-sterile case, respectively, as functions of the intensity of the distortion of genetic ratios in the sperm pool. In particular, if q is the equilibrium frequency of the t allele and m is the proportion of t bearing sperm in the genetic pool of heterozygous males

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