Figure 4.

The number of generations for consecutive unnecessary minicircle classes to be lost. The last few classes take many thousands of generations to be lost. The simulations are initially run for 2,000 generations with all classes being necessary. This is to lose the artificial initial conditions. Then, 55 classes become unnecessary, i.e., if their frequencies reach zero in a cell, the cell is still viable. The loss time was averaged over 10 simulations; error bars show ± 2 SEM. Previously published in ref. 60.