Small population size

Sociology

Inbreeding

Population

Genetic variation

Negative selection

Biology

Gene

Genotype

Balancing selection

Demography

Inbreeding depression

Genome

Allele

Habitat

Single-nucleotide polymorphism

Ecology

Genetic load

Runs of Homozygosity

Effective population size

Genetics

Population fragmentation

Genetic drift

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Increasing habitat fragmentation leads to wild populations becoming small, isolated, and threatened by inbreeding depression. However, small populations may be able to purge recessive deleterious alleles as they become expressed in homozygotes, thus reducing inbreeding depression and increasing population viability. We used whole-genome sequences from 57 tigers to estimate individual inbreeding and mutation load in a small-isolated and two large-connected populations in India. As expected, the small-isolated population had substantially higher average genomic inbreeding (

Genomic evidence for inbreeding depression and purging of deleterious genetic variation in Indian tigers