Assortative Mating and Disassortative Mating

It is reasonable to assume that if two intermating plants resemble each other more, with regard to some trait, than two random plants, then their genotypes for the involved loci will tend to be similar. The population genetic effect of such assortative mating is a decrease of the frequency of plants with a heterozygous genotype. With disassortative mating the intermating plants will tend to resemble each other less than two random plants. The population genetic effect of repeated backcrossing is also considered in this chapter as repeated backcrossing may be considered as a particular application of disassortative mating.