New estimates of the rates and effects of mildly deleterious mutation in Drosophila melanogaster

The genomic rate and distribution of effects of deleterious mutations are important parameters in evolutionary theory. The most detailed information comes from the work of Mukai and Ohnishi, who allowed mutations to accumulate on Drosophila melanogaster second chromosomes, shielded from selection and recombination by being maintained heterozygous in males. Averaged over studies, the estimated rate of nonlethal viability mutations per second chromosome per generation under an equal-effects model, U-BM, was 0.12, suggesting a high genomic mutation rate. We have performed a mutation-accumulation experiment similar to those of Mukai and Ohnishi, except that three large homozygous control populations were maintained. Egg-to-adult viability of 72 nonlethal mutation-accumulation (MA) lines and the controls was assayed after 27-33 generations of mutation accumulation. The rate of decline in mean viability was significantly lower than observed by Mukai, and the rate of increase in among-line variance was significantly higher, Our U-BM estimate of 0.02 is much lower than the previous estimates. Our results suggest that the rate of mutations that detectably reduce viability may not be much greater than the lethal mutation rate (0.01 in these lines), but the results also are consistent with models that include many mutations with very small effects.