Purging

Under what circumstances does purging occur?

Under what circumstances does purging occur?

The removal of deleterious mutations in a population is key to ensure population viability. We however know very little about how often this process of purging occurs in wild study systems, and what increases the efficiency of purging. Purging is often studied in severely inbred populations with low effective population sizes.

In this project, we test whether purging occurs in a population of black grouse that has no record of a heavy bottleneck and that does not show genomic evidence of severe inbreeding.