What happens to deleterious mutations in a population?

Deleterious mutations are genetic alterations that can negatively impact an organism's fitness. In a population, these mutations typically lead to reduced survival or reproductive success. As a result, natural selection tends to eliminate such mutations over generations because individuals carrying them are less likely to pass on their genes to the next generation.

The lost frequency of deleterious mutations is often facilitated by mechanisms like purifying selection, where alleles that are harmful to the organism are actively removed from the population. Consequently, while these mutations may initially arise, they are generally weeded out, causing them to become rare or, in many cases, completely lost from the gene pool over time. Thus, they result in little to no significant change in the population's overall genetic composition.