Negative selection (natural selection)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Negative selection (disambiguation).

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Stabilizing selection. (Discuss)

Negative selection, in natural selection, is the selective removal of rare alleles that are deleterious. This is also called purifying selection and can result in the maintenance of conserved gene sequences between species over long periods of evolutionary time. The ongoing process of purging of deleterious alleles, due to the constant occurrence of new deleterious mutants, is referred to as background selection.

This genetics article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.