• Corpus ID: 16970584

The number of heterozygous nucleotide sites maintained in a finite population due to steady flux of mutations.

@article{Kimura1969TheNO,
  title={The number of heterozygous nucleotide sites maintained in a finite population due to steady flux of mutations.},
  author={M Kimura},
  journal={Genetics},
  year={1969},
  volume={61 4},
  pages={
          893-903
        }
}

• M. Kimura
• Published 1 April 1969
• Biology
• Genetics

N natural populations, it is expected that there is a constant supply of mutaI tions in each generation. These mutations may have different persistence depending on their fitnesses, but collectively, they constitute the ultimate source of genetic variability in the populations. Since the maintenance of genetic variability is an important subject of study in population genetics, it may be worthwhile to investigate, using various models, the effect of mutation on the genetic variability. For example, KIMURA and CROW (1964) studied the number of alleles maintained in a finite population, assuming that each mutant is an allele not preexisting in the population. In the present paper I will use a different model and will investigate the number of heterozygous sites per individual and some related quantities that represent the statistical properties of the mutant frequency distribution, assuming that a very large number of independent sites are available for mutation. In this paper, “site” refers to a single nucleotide pair, although the theory is still appropriate to a small group of nucleotides, such as a codon.