Mutation Pressure
Also found in: Medical.
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.
Mutation Pressure
a factor that tends to decrease the average fitness of populations because of the continuous appearance of injurious hereditary changes. The mutation pressure contributes to the general genetic load of deleterious genes in a population. Besides being influenced by the mutation pressure, the fitness of populations is affected by immigration from neighboring populations of individuals with genotypes less suited to the new conditions than the indigenous inhabitants, dissimilar fitness of homozygotes and heterozygotes, and other factors.
REFERENCE
Muller, H. J. “Our Load of Mutations.” American Journal of Human Genetics, 1950, vol. 2, p. 111.The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.