Strong selective sweeps associated with ampliconic regions in great ape X chromosomes
Abstract
The unique inheritance pattern of X chromosomes makes them preferential targets of adaptive evolution. We here investigate natural selection on the X chromosome in all species of great apes. We find that diversity is more strongly reduced around genes on the X compared with autosomes, and that a higher proportion of substitutions results from positive selection. Strikingly, the X exhibits several megabase long regions where diversity is reduced more than five fold. These regions overlap significantly among species, and have a higher singleton proportion, population differentiation, and nonsynonymous to synonymous substitution ratio. We rule out background selection and soft selective sweeps as explanations for these observations, and conclude that several strong selective sweeps have occurred independently in similar regions in several species. Since these regions are strongly associated with ampliconic sequences we propose that intra-genomic conflict between the X and the Y chromosomes is a major driver of X chromosome evolution.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1402.5790,
title = {Strong selective sweeps associated with ampliconic regions in great ape X chromosomes},
author = {Kiwoong Nam and Kasper Munch and Asger Hobolth and Julien Y. Dutheil and Krishna Veeramah and August Woerner and Michael F. Hammer and Great Ape Genome Diversity Project and Thomas Mailund and Mikkel H. Schierup},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.5790},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
This the resubmitted version, with supplementary