Negative selection (natural selection)
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For other uses, see Negative selection (disambiguation).
Negative selection, in natural selection, is the selective removal of rare alleles that are deleterious. This is also called purifying selection and can result in the maintenance of conserved gene sequences between species over long periods of evolutionary time. The ongoing process of purging of deleterious alleles, due to the constant occurrence of new deleterious mutants, is referred to as background selection.