Inbreeding depression resulting from partially recessive deleterious alleles is thought to be the main genetic factor preventing self‐fertilizing mutants from spreading in outcrossing hermaphroditic populations. However, deleterious alleles may also generate an advantage to selfers in terms of more efficient purging, while the effects of epistasis among those alleles on inbreeding depression and mating system evolution remain little explored. In this article, we use a general model of selection to disentangle the effects of different forms of epistasis (additive‐by‐additive, additive‐by‐dominance, and dominance‐by‐dominance) on inbreeding depression and on the strength of selection for selfing. Models with fixed epistasis across loci, and models of stabilizing selection acting on quantitative traits (generating distributions of epistasis) are considered as special cases. Besides its effects on inbreeding depression, epistasis may increase the purging advantage associated with selfing (when it is negative on average), while the variance in epistasis favors selfing through the generation of linkage disequilibria that increase mean fitness. Approximations for the strengths of these effects are derived, and compared with individual‐based simulation results.

中文翻译：

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上位性、近交衰退和自体受精的进化

部分隐性有害等位基因导致的近交抑制被认为是阻止自体受精突变体在异交雌雄同体种群中传播的主要遗传因素。然而，有害等位基因也可能在更有效的清除方面对自交产生优势，而这些等位基因之间的上位性对近交抑制和交配系统进化的影响仍然很少被探索。在这篇文章中，我们使用一个一般的选择模型来解开不同形式的上位性（逐加加法、逐优势加法和逐优势优势）对近交衰退和选择强度的影响。自我。跨位点具有固定上位性的模型，作用于数量性状的稳定选择模型（生成上位性分布）被视为特殊情况。除了对近交抑制的影响外，上位性可能会增加与自交相关的清除优势（当它平均为负时），而上位性的方差通过产生增加平均适应性的连锁不平衡有利于自交。推导出这些效应强度的近似值，并与基于个体的模拟结果进行比较。