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Concept
Conservation genetics
Summary
Conservation genetics is an interdisciplinary subfield of population genetics that aims to understand the dynamics of genes in a population for the purpose of natural resource management and extinction prevention. Researchers involved in conservation genetics come from a variety of fields including population genetics, natural resources, molecular ecology, biology, evolutionary biology, and systematics. Genetic diversity is one of the three fundamental measures of biodiversity (along with species diversity and ecosystem diversity), so it is an important consideration in the wider field of conservation biology.
Genetic diversity is the total number of genetic characteristics in a species. It can be measured in several ways: observed heterozygosity, expected heterozygosity, the mean number of alleles per locus, or the percentage of polymorphic loci. Genetic diversity on the population level is a crucial focus for conservation genetics as it influences both the health and long-term survival of populations: decreased genetic diversity has been associated with reduced fitness, such as high juvenile mortality, diminished population growth, reduced immunity, and ultimately, higher extinction risk.
Heterozygosity, a fundamental measurement of genetic diversity in population genetics, plays an important role in determining the chance of a population surviving environmental change, novel pathogens not previously encountered, as well as the average fitness of a population over successive generations. Heterozygosity is also deeply connected, in population genetics theory, to population size (which itself clearly has a fundamental importance to conservation). All things being equal, small populations will be less heterozygous – across their whole genomes – than comparable, but larger, populations. This lower heterozygosity (i.e. low genetic diversity) renders small populations more susceptible to the challenges mentioned above.
Official source
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