Frequent adaptation and the McDonald-Kreitman test.
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ABSTRACT: Population genomic studies have shown that genetic draft and background selection can profoundly affect the genome-wide patterns of molecular variation. We performed forward simulations under realistic gene-structure and selection scenarios to investigate whether such linkage effects impinge on the ability of the McDonald-Kreitman (MK) test to infer the rate of positive selection (?) from polymorphism and divergence data. We find that in the presence of slightly deleterious mutations, MK estimates of ? severely underestimate the true rate of adaptation even if all polymorphisms with population frequencies under 50% are excluded. Furthermore, already under intermediate rates of adaptation, genetic draft substantially distorts the site frequency spectra at neutral and functional sites from the expectations under mutation-selection-drift balance. MK-type approaches that first infer demography from synonymous sites and then use the inferred demography to correct the estimation of ? obtain almost the correct ? in our simulations. However, these approaches typically infer a severe past population expansion although there was no such expansion in the simulations, casting doubt on the accuracy of methods that infer demography from synonymous polymorphism data. We propose a simple asymptotic extension of the MK test that yields accurate estimates of ? in our simulations and should provide a fruitful direction for future studies.
SUBMITTER: Messer PW
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3666677 | biostudies-literature | 2013 May
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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