Genetic Characterization of Fitness Traits

Researchers quickly realized that genetic factors created variation among animals making it difficult to test the hypotheses. For many experimental circumstances, it is critical in research to have as much uniformity as feasible. Inbreeding has a significant impact on a population's genetic makeup, and under the right circumstances, it may result in the development of inbred strains in which all individuals are genetically similar at nearly all loci. Inbreeding splits a population into subpopulation and responsible for unwanted genetic drift. The response to inbreeding depression varies between traits, wherein traits that involve fitness, such as litter size or lactation in mammals are the ones critically affected. Outcross usually changes the mean and increases the genetic variance of the resulting population.