Potential germline competition in animals and its evolutionary implications.

Mutation, mitotic crossing over and mitotic gene conversion can create genetic diversity in otherwise uniform diploid cell lineages. In the germline this diversification may result in competition between diploid germline phenotypes, with subsequent biases in the frequency of alleles transmitted to the offspring. Sperm competition is a well documented feature of many higher organisms and a model is developed to quantify this process. Competition, and hence selection, can also occur by differential survival of diploid lineages before meiosis. It is concluded that under certain circumstances germline selection is an efficient means of eliminating unfavorable alleles from the population. This does not require differences in adult fertility or viability which is the usual mechanism cited as causing changes in gene frequency in a population. It is proposed that such competition may play a role in maintaining the efficiency of basic metabolic pathways.