Figure 6.

Mitochondrial bottlenecks can stall the irreversible mutation accumulation. Stochastic genome resampling through mitochondrial bottlenecking reduces the rate of mutation accumulation dm/dt in the absence of recombination among mitochondrial loci. Segregational drift is less efficient in generating mutational variance among cells, with larger mitochondrial populations, M, resulting in faster rates of mutation fixation. Parameter values are: N = 500, C = 1, R = 0, and L = 5.0. Here, s = 0.02 and K = 100. Error bars indicate the 95% C.I.s for the SEM ($\pm 1.96\sqrt{m_{fix}/t^2},$ where m_fix is the number of fixed mutations after t generations).