Seasonal fluctuations in fitness result in severe reductions in effective population size
Abstract
Genetic evidence for fluctuating selection has begun to accumulate for different species over the past few decades, especially for the Drosophila genus, where studies have reported hundreds of loci undergoing putatively adaptive oscillations across successive seasons. However, most theoretical and simulation studies of fluctuating selection have relied on abstract or weakly parameterized models, making it difficult to assess their relevance for natural populations. In this study, we simulate multilocus seasonally fluctuating selection acting on standing genetic variation under a recently developed model and examine its effect on the variance effective population size (Ne) at a genome-wide scale. By recapitulating genomic, demographic, and evolutionary parameters from natural Drosophila populations in our simulations, we were able to reproduce allele frequency oscillations reported in recent studies and show that these lead to ∼50% genome-wide reductions in Ne. We also demonstrate that Ne reductions are well predicted by the maximum frequency amplitude among all adaptively fluctuating loci, and that the frequency amplitudes are largely determined by the number of adaptively fluctuating loci and the strength of their epistatic interactions. Our results demonstrate that fluctuating selection can substantially reduce effective population size and underscore the importance of temporally variable selection in shaping genome-wide patterns of variation beyond classical models.
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BibTeX
@article{johnson2026seasonal,
title = {{Seasonal fluctuations in fitness result in severe reductions in effective population size}},
author = {Olivia L Johnson and Raymond Tobler and Joshua M Schmidt and Christian D Huber},
journal = {G3: Genes | Genomes | Genetics},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1093/g3journal/jkag252},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1093/g3journal/jkag252},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Seasonal fluctuations in fitness result in severe reductions in effective population size
AU - Olivia L Johnson
AU - Raymond Tobler
AU - Joshua M Schmidt
AU - Christian D Huber
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/03
JO - G3: Genes | Genomes | Genetics
DO - 10.1093/g3journal/jkag252
UR - https://doi.org/10.1093/g3journal/jkag252
AB - Genetic evidence for fluctuating selection has begun to accumulate for different species over the past few decades, especially for the Drosophila genus, where studies have reported hundreds of loci undergoing putatively adaptive oscillations across successive seasons. However, most theoretical and simulation studies of fluctuating selection have relied on abstract or weakly parameterized models, making it difficult to assess their relevance for natural populations. In this study, we simulate multilocus seasonally fluctuating selection acting on standing genetic variation under a recently developed model and examine its effect on the variance effective population size (Ne) at a genome-wide scale. By recapitulating genomic, demographic, and evolutionary parameters from natural Drosophila populations in our simulations, we were able to reproduce allele frequency oscillations reported in recent studies and show that these lead to ∼50% genome-wide reductions in Ne. We also demonstrate that Ne reductions are well predicted by the maximum frequency amplitude among all adaptively fluctuating loci, and that the frequency amplitudes are largely determined by the number of adaptively fluctuating loci and the strength of their epistatic interactions. Our results demonstrate that fluctuating selection can substantially reduce effective population size and underscore the importance of temporally variable selection in shaping genome-wide patterns of variation beyond classical models.
SN - 2160-1836
ER -