Eichhornia paniculata Transcriptome or Gene expression

It has been proposed that the frequent extinction of selfing lineages is because reduced genetic variation in inbred populations results in less efficient selection. The loss of diversity in the genome may also make the deleterious effects of mutations more apparent. We found that the transition to self-fertilization in the plant Eichhornia paniculata is accompanied by an increase in frequency of mutations under very weak selection, but also by an increase in mutations under strong purifying selection. By characterizing the types of mutations present in natural populations, we found that the two selective forces co-occur in selfing genomes.