What is balancing selection?

Balancing selection is a type of natural selection that maintains genetic variation in a population by favoring individuals with different genotypes. This can result in the maintenance of multiple alleles of a gene in a population, rather than one allele becoming fixed over time.

One common example of balancing selection is heterozygote advantage, where individuals with two different alleles for a particular gene have a higher fitness than individuals with two copies of the same allele. This can result in the maintenance of both alleles in the population.

Another type of balancing selection is frequency-dependent selection, where the fitness of a particular genotype depends on its frequency in the population. This can lead to cycling of allele frequencies over time, as the fitness of different genotypes changes based on their relative abundance.

Overall, balancing selection plays an important role in maintaining genetic diversity in populations and can help to increase the resilience of a species to changing environmental conditions.