Female meiotic drive shapes the distribution of rare inversion polymorphisms in Drosophila melanogaster.

This article focuses on how female meiotic drive influences the distribution of rare chromosomal inversion polymorphisms in natural populations of *Drosophila melanogaster*. It develops a mathematical model parameterized with experimental data to describe crossover-dependent female meiotic drive arising from overlapping inversions, which generate asymmetric dyads during meiosis that preferentially transmit shorter chromatids to the functional egg nucleus. This mechanism favors smaller, distal inversions and accelerates the elimination of larger, proximal inversions, producing transmission bias and fitness underdominance due to lethal segmental aneuploidy. Simulations incorporating this form of selection accurately predict observed nonrandom patterns in inversion size, position, and linkage phase in natural populations, suggesting that female meiotic drive is a weak but significant evolutionary force shaping the genomic distribution of rare inversion polymorphisms in *D. melanogaster*.