Abstract
POPULATION geneticists have never agreed on the which overdominance of fitness—that is, the which the fitness of the heterozygote exceeds the fitness.of both homozygotes—is responsible for the maintenance of genetic variability in populations1. It has been proposed2–4 that heteromultimers formed by random association of enzyme subunits coded by two different alleles provide a molecular basis for overdominance. This hypothesis stems from the observation that heteromultimers often differ from homomultimers in a number of aspects5, sometimes restoring enzymatic activity when both homozygotes lacked such activity2. Clearly, the crucial step towards associating (or disassociating) observations of this type with overdominance of fitness must be taken if we were to test the hypothesis that heteromultimers per se are responsible for the high amounts of variation observed in populations. I argue here that the enormous amounts of electrophoretic data now available exclude this hypothesis.
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ZOUROS, E. Hybrid molecules and the superiority of the heterozygote. Nature 262, 227–229 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1038/262227a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/262227a0
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