Senescence–the progressive age-dependent decline in performance–occurs in most
organisms. There is considerable variation in the onset and rate of senescence between …

Conservation genetics studies of populations bottlenecks are commonly framed under the
detrimental paradigm of inbreeding depression. This conceptual paradigm presupposes a …

Cooperative breeders provide a particularly interesting scenario for studying inbreeding.
Such populations are viscous due to delayed dispersal and short dispersal distances …

Abstract genhet is an R function which calculates the five most used estimates of individual
heterozygosity. The advantage of this program is that it can be applied to any diploid …

Females should prefer to be fertilized by males that increase the genetic quality of their
offspring. In vertebrates, genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) play a key …

Background The gut microbiome (GM) can influence many biological processes in the host,
impacting its health and survival, but the GM can also be influenced by the host's traits. In …

Genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) form a vital part of the vertebrate
immune system and play a major role in pathogen resistance. The extremely high levels of …

Inbreeding results in more homozygous offspring that should suffer reduced fitness, but it
can be difficult to quantify these costs for several reasons. First, inbreeding depression may …

The majority of reported multilocus heterozygosity–fitness correlations (HFCs) are from
large, outbred populations, and their relevance to studies on inbreeding depression in …

Understanding where genetic variation exists, and how it influences fitness within
populations is important from an evolutionary and conservation perspective. Signatures of …