‘Haldaneʹs Sieve’ in a metapopulation: sifting through plant reproductive polymorphisms

An important result of population genetics is that advantageous mutations will be fixed by selection in a population with a greater probability if they are dominant rather than recessive. This selective filter on new variants entering a population, termed ‘Haldaneʹs Sieve’, has hitherto been invoked to account for the greater role of dominant than completely recessive mutations in adaptive evolution. Here, we suggest that a process similar to Haldaneʹs Sieve will act on migrants into subpopulations of a metapopulation, and that the repeated action of Haldaneʹs Sieve on alleles maintained by frequency-dependent selection, such as those responsible for many plant reproductive polymorphisms, is expected to bias their frequency distribution in favour of dominant alleles. The genetic and phenotypic signatures left by these processes might provide additional indirect support for the contentious idea that metapopulation dynamics have had an important role in shaping the ecology and evolution of some plant species.