Clonal interference

The idea of clonal interference was introduced by American geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller in 1932.

[1] It explains why beneficial mutations can take a long time to get fixated or even disappear in asexually reproducing populations.

He reasoned that the loss of beneficial mutations because of clonal interference inhibits the adaptivity of asexually reproducing species.

[1] From the 1970s, however, biologists have demonstrated that asexually and sexually reproducing strategies yield the same rate of the evolutionary adaptivity.

This has to do with the fact that clonal interference also influences another part of the reproductive strategy of a population, namely mutation rate.

This way, clonal interference influences the evolutionary dynamics of plasmid-host adaptation, resulting in faster stabilisation of plasmids in a population.

The phenomenon of clonal interference also occurs in cancer and pre-cancer cell lineages within a patient.

This diagram illustrates how sex might create novel genotypes more rapidly. Two advantageous alleles A and B occur at random. The two alleles are recombined rapidly in a sexual population (top), but in an asexual population (bottom) the two alleles often arise in separate lineages and compete with each other.