An important goal of conservation genetics is to determine if the viability of small populations is reduced by a loss of adaptive variation due to genetic drift. Here, we assessed the impact of drift and selection on direct measures of adaptive variation (toxin loci encoding venom proteins) in the eastern massasauga rattlesnake (
Theory predicts that threatened species living in small populations will experience high levels of inbreeding that will increase their genetic load, but recent work suggests that the impact of load may be minimized by purging resulting from long‐term population bottlenecks. Empirical studies that examine this idea using genome‐wide estimates of inbreeding and genetic load in threatened species are limited. Here we use individual genome resequencing data to compare levels of inbreeding, levels of genetic load (estimated as mutation load) and population history in threatened Eastern massasauga rattlesnakes (
- Award ID(s):
- 1638872
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10360202
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Molecular Ecology
- Volume:
- 30
- Issue:
- 21
- ISSN:
- 0962-1083
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 5454-5469
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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