Research article Differences in the evolutionary history of disease genes affected by dominant or recessive mutations

This Provisional PDF corresponds to the article as it appeared upon acceptance. Copyedited and fully formatted PDF and full text (HTML) versions will be made available soon. Molecular evolution of genes in avian genomes

Shifts in the intensity of purifying selection: An analysis of genome-wide polymorphism data from two closely related yeast species

The nearly neutral theory of molecular evolution predicts that the efficacy of both positive and purifying selection is a function of the long-term effective population size (Ne) of a species. Under this theory, the efficacy of natural selection should increase with Ne. Here, we tested this simple prediction by surveying;1.5 to 1.8 Mb of protein coding sequence in the two subspecies of the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus algirus and O. c. cuniculus), a mammal species characterized by high levels of nucleotide diversity and Ne estimates for each subspecies on the order of 1 10 6. When the segregation of slightly deleterious mutations and demographic effects were taken into account, we inferred that.60 % of amino acid substitutions on the autosomes were driven to fixation by positive selection. Moreover, we inferred that a small fraction of new amino acid mutations (,4%) are effectively neutral (defined as 0, Nes, 1) and that this fraction was negatively correlated with a gene’s expression level. Consistent with models of recurrent adaptive evolution, we detected a negative correlation between levels of synonymous site polymorphism and the rate of protein evolution, although the correlation was weak and nonsignificant. No systematic X chromosome–autosome difference was found in the efficacy of selection. For example, the proportion of adaptive substitutions was significantly higher on the X chromosome compared

Brain-expressed genes are known to evolve slowly in mammals. Nevertheless, since brains of higher primates have evolved rapidly, one might expect acceleration in DNA sequence evolution in their brain-expressed genes. In this study, we carried out full-length cDNA sequencing on the brain transcriptome of an Old World monkey (OWM) and then conducted three-way comparisons among (i) mouse, OWM, and human, and (ii) OWM, chimpanzee, and human. Although brain-expressed genes indeed appear to evolve more rapidly in species with more advanced brains (apes. OWM. mouse), a similar lineage effect is observable for most other genes. The broad inclusion of genes in the reference set to represent the genomic average is therefore critical to this type of analysis. Calibrated against the genomic average, the rate of evolution among brain-expressed genes is probably lower (or at most equal) in humans than in chimpanzee and OWM. Interestingly, the trend of slow evolution in coding sequence is no less pronounced among brain-specific genes, vis-à-vis brain-expressed genes in general. The human brain may thus differ from those of our close relatives in two opposite directions: (i) faster evolution in gene expression, and (ii) a likely slowdown in the