Abstract
Deleterious alleles can reach high frequency in small populations because of random fluctuations in allele frequency. This may lead, over time, to reduced average fitness. In that sense, selection is more ‘effective’ in larger populations. Recent studies have considered whether the different demographic histories across human populations have resulted in differences in the number, distribution, and severity of deleterious variants, leading to an animated debate. This article first seeks to clarify some terms of the debate by identifying differences in definitions and assumptions used in recent studies. We argue that variants of Morton, Crow and Muller’s ‘total mutational damage’ provide the soundest and most practical basis for such comparisons. Using simulations, analytical calculations, and 1000 Genomes data, we provide an intuitive and quantitative explanation for the observed similarity in genetic load across populations. We show that recent demography has likely modulated the effect of selection, and still affects it, but the net result of the accumulated differences is small. Direct observation of differential efficacy of selection for specific allele classes is nevertheless possible with contemporary datasets. By contrast, identifying average genome-wide differences in the efficacy of selection across populations will require many modelling assumptions, and is unlikely to provide much biological insight about human populations.
One of the best-known predictions of population genetics is that smaller populations harbor less diversity at any one time but accumulate a higher number of deleterious variants over time [1]. Considerable subsequent theoretical effort has been devoted to the study of fitness differences at equilibrium in populations of different sizes (e.g., [2]) and in subdivided populations (e.g., [3, 4]). The reduction in diversity has been observed in human populations that have undergone strong population bottlenecks: For example, heterozygosity decreased in populations that left Africa, and further decreased with successive founder events [5, 6, 7, 8]. The effect of demography on the accumulation of deleterious variation has been more elusive in both humans and non-human species. In conservation genetics, where fitness can be measured directly and effective population sizes are small, a modest correlation between population size and fitness was observed [9]. In humans, the first estimates of the fitness cost of deleterious mutations were obtained through the analysis of census data [10], but recent studies have focused on bioinformatic prediction using genomic data [11, 12]. Lohmueller et al. [13] found that sites variable among Europeans were more likely to be deleterious than sites variable among African-Americans, and attributed the finding to a reduced efficacy of selection in Europeans because of the Out-of-Africa (OOA) bottleneck. However, recent studies [14, 15] suggest that there has not been enough time for substantial differences in fitness to accumulate in these populations, at least under an additive model of dominance. By contrast Peischl et al. [16], and more recently Henn et al. [17], have claimed significant differences among populations under range expansion models, and Fu et al. [18] claims a slight excess in the number of deleterious alleles in European-Americans compared to that in African-Americans. These apparent contradictions have sparked a heated debate as to whether the efficacy of selection has indeed been different across human populations [19, 18]. Part of the apparent discrepancy stems for disagreement about how we should measure the effect of selection.
What does it mean for selection to be ‘effective’? Some genetic variants increase the expected number of offspring by carriers. As a result, these variants tend to increase in frequency in the population. This correlation between the fitness of a variant and its fate in the population—that is, natural selection—holds independently of the biology and the history of the population. However, the rate at which deleterious alleles are removed from a population depends on mutation, dominance, linkage, and demography, and can vary across populations. Multiple metrics have been proposed to quantify the action of selection in human populations and verify the classical population genetic predictions, leading to apparent discrepancies between studies.
In this article, we first review different metrics used in recent empirical work to quantify the action of selection in human populations. We show that many commonly used metrics implicitly rely on ‘steady-state’ or ‘equilibrium’ assumptions, wherein genetic diversity within populations is independent of time. This condition is not met in human populations. We discuss two measures for the efficacy of selection that are appropriate for the study of human populations and other out-of-equilibrium populations.
We then seek to provide an intuitive but quantitative understanding of the effect of mutation, selection, and drift on the efficacy of selection in out-of-equilibrium populations. This is done through a combination of extensive simulation and analytical work describing differentiation between populations after a split from a common ancestor. Using this information, we discuss how the classical predictions concerning the effect of demography on selection could be verified in empirical data from human populations.
1 Measuring selection in out-of-equilibrium populations
We consider large panmictic populations whose size N(t) may change over time, and whose reproduction follows the Wright-Fisher model [20]. Given alleles a and A, we assume that genotype aa has fitness 1, aA has fitness 1 + si hi, and AA has fitness 1 + si. We suppose that A is the least favourable allele (si < 0) and that 0 ≤ hi ≤ 1. In a random-mating population, an allele A at frequency xi adds an average of δωi = si (2hi xi + (1 – 2hi)) to individual fitness compared to the optimal genotype. We compute the expected fitness over multiple loci as under the assumption that the individual selection coefficients si are small. Finally, we define the genetic load L = 1 – ω as the total relative fitness reduction compared to the optimal genotype, ωmax = 1. This yields
To study the effect of selection over short time spans and in out-of-equilibrium populations, we want to define instantaneous measures of the effect of selection on the genetic load and the frequency of deleterious alleles. In this article, the rate of adaptation refers the instantaneous rate of fitness increase (or load decrease) in a population. It has contributions from selection, mutation, and drift. The contribution of selection has been the object of considerable theoretical attention: It is the object of the Fitness Increase Theorem (FIT) (see, e.g., [20]). We will refer to the contribution of selection to the rate of adaptation as the FIT efficacy of selection.
We also wish to study the effect of selection on the frequency of deleterious alleles. There are multiple ways to combine frequencies across loci to obtain a single, genome-wide metric: Any linear function of the allele frequencies, with ρi > 0 a weight assigned to locus i, provides an equally acceptable metric. A natural option, which weights alleles according to their selection coefficient, is Morton, Crow and Muller’s total mutational damage [21], which is equivalent to the additive genetic load that would be observed if all dominance coefficients were replaced by 1/2, i.e., . Mutation and selection systematically affect Llin, but genetic drift does not. We define the Morton efficacy of selection as the contribution of selection to . In simulations, where all alleles have equal fitness, we use ρi = –s. Another common choice, in empirical studies, is to set ρi = 1 for all sites annotated as deleterious by a prediction algorithm, and zero otherwise [15, 14, 18]. Since different empirical studies use different ρi, direct comparison of the results can be challenging.
Because Morton and FIT efficacies are instantaneous measures of the effect of selection, they can be integrated over time to measure the effect of selection over arbitrary periods. Their integrals over long periods are directly related to classical steady-state metrics such as the rate of fixation of deleterious alleles and the average genetic load in a population.
To understand how genetic drift affects the FIT and Morton efficacy of selection, consider an allele with parental frequency x, selection coefficient |s| ≪ 1, and no dominance (h = 0.5). In the descending population, this allele is drawn with probability x’ ⋍ x + sx(1 – x)/2. Figure 1 shows the resulting distribution in offspring allele frequency for x = 0.5, s = –0.6, and 2N = 100,500, and ∞. The average frequency x’ is independent of N, hence the expected FIT and Morton efficacies are equal in all populations: Genetic drift does not instantaneously change the effect of selection.
If we let these populations evolve further, however, we will eventually find that deleterious allele frequencies decrease more slowly in smaller populations. This is because natural selection acts on fitness differences, and therefore requires genetic variation. By dispersing allele frequencies and reducing diversity, genetic drift also reduces the subsequent effect of selection (see Figure 2). Drift accumulated during one generation can change the efficacy of selection for many future generations. Conversely, the current average efficacy of selection depends on the drift accumulated in many previous generations. This delay between the action of drift and its impact on selection can be ignored in steady-state populations but not in out-of-equilibrium populations. For this reason, measures of the effect of selection that have been developed for populations of constant size can be misleading or biased when applied to populations out of equilibrium.
1.1 Other measures of the effect of selection
The rate at which deleterious mutations are eradicated from a population, for example, is an intuitive metric for the effect of selection that has been recently applied to out-of-equilibrium populations [22]. Over long time scales or in the steady state, this rate of eradication is indeed equivalent to Morton’s efficacy of selection. However, in out-of-equilibrium populations, the rate of eradication is a biased measure of the effect of selection. In Figure 1, the smaller population has a higher rate of eradication of deleterious alleles, but this reflects the action of drift rather than the effect of selection. This effect of drift on the rate of eradication of deleterious alleles is short-lived on phylogenetic time scales, but it can be the dominant effect for time-scales relevant to human populations.
Classical work on the efficacy of selection in steady-state populations has emphasized the role of the combined parameter Ns in the dynamics of deleterious alleles. The importance of this combined parameter has led some authors to argue that it should be used as a metric for the efficacy of selection even outside the steady-state [15, 19]. This is problematic for practical and fundamental reasons. On the practical side, the parameter N(t)s is a function of time and does not allow for comparison between populations over finite times: N(t)s is not a rate, and its time integral is meaningless. At a more fundamental level, an instantaneous difference between two populations in the product N(t)s simply indicates a difference in effective population sizes. The interesting biological question is not whether the population sizes are different, but whether these differences lead to differential action of selection by the process illustrated in Figure 2.
More generally, it is commonly proposed that the effect of selection should be measured relative to the effect of drift [19], because the classical parameter Ns is a ratio between a selection term s and a drift term 1/N. Such a relative measure is not necessary: Morton and FIT efficacies are absolute measures of the effect of selection and they do capture the classical interaction between selection and genetic drift: In populations of constant size, these efficacies do depend on the relative magnitude of selection and drift coefficients through the classical parameter Ns. In out-of equilibrium populations, however, they depend on a more complex function of s and N(t). In other words, the classical parameter Ns does not measure the effect of selection as compared to the effect of drift; but rather the effect of selection as modulated by past genetic drift.
Finally, even though most classical work has focused on the effect of selection on fitness or allele frequency, Henn et al. [17] recently proposed to measure the effect of selection on diversity, defining a ‘reduction in heterozygosity’ (RH) statistic that compares the heterozygosity of selected and neutral sites. We show in Section S1.2 that RH is robust to the effect of genetic drift, but it can be biased by recent mutations.
2 Asymptotic results
To study the effect of selection after a population split, we calculate the moments of the expected allele frequency distribution φ(x, t) under the diffusion approximation. In this formulation, ϕ(x,t)dx represents the expected number of alleles with frequency between x and x + dx at time t. In a randomly mating population of size N = N(t) ≫ 1 and constant s and h, the evolution of ϕ(x, t) approximately follows the diffusion equation [20]: where u is the total mutation rate. The first term describes the effect of drift; the second term, the effect of selection; and the third term describes the influx of new mutations: δ is Dirac’s delta distribution. From this equation, we can easily calculate evolution equations for moments of the expected allele frequency distribution µk = 〉xk〉. For example, the rate of change in allele frequencies , is driven by mutation and selection: where Γi, h = 4(µi – µi+1)h + 4(1 – 2h)(µi+1 – µi+2) is a function of the diversity in the population that generalizes the heterozygosity π1 = Γ1,1/2 (see Appendix for detailed calculations, and References [23, 24] for other applications of the moment approach). We can define the contributions of selection and mutation to changes in allele frequency as and . Morton’s efficacy of selection at a locus is simply . Whereas the effect of mutation is constant and independent of population size, Morton’s efficacy depends on the history of the population through Γ1, h:
Similarly, changes in the expected fitness W can be decomposed into contributions from mutation, drift, and selection:
Favorable mutations increase fitness, drift increases fitness when fitness of the heterozygote is below the mean of the homozygotes, and selection always increases average fitness.
The FIT efficacy, , is therefore
The right-hand side is the additive variance in fitness, and Equation (5) is an expression of the Fitness Increase Theorem (see, e.g., Equations 1.9 and 1.42 in [20]). Importantly, the FIT efficacy only describes one of three genetic contributions to the rate of adaptation. Interpreting changes in fitness in terms of FIT efficacy requires picking apart the effects of drift and mutation from those of selection. In addition to these genetic effects, changes in the environment can directly affect fitness, introducing a further confounder [25].
Now consider an ancestral population that splits into two isolated randomly mating populations with initial sizes NA and NB at time t = 0. The populations may experience continuous population size fluctuations. If we expand the moments µk of the allele frequency distribution in Taylor series around t = 0, we can easily solve the diffusion equation to study the differentiation between the two populations right after the bottleneck. Here we provide an overview of the main results. Detailed derivations are provided in the Appendix.
The difference in fitness between the two populations, ΔW(t) = WA (t) – WB (t) grows linearly in time under dominance:
Here, t is measured in generations, π1,o is the expected heterozygosity in the source population, and O(t2) represents terms at least quadratic in t. This rapid, linear differentiation is driven by drift coupled with dominance. The smaller population has higher fitness when h > 0.5 for s < 0: Drift hides dominant, deleterious alleles from the action of selection.
If the source population is large and h > 0, we have [26] and the rate of fitness differentiation is independent of s. This generalizes Haldane’s observation that load is insensitive to the selection coefficient in large populations [27]. By contrast to the constant-size population case, however, the observation does not hold when h = 0. The initial response to the bottleneck is independent of fitness for 0 < h < .5 (see Figures S2 and S3), but not for h = 0 or h = 0.5 (see Figures 3 and S1).
The effect of selection on fitness differences, ΔWs(t), grows only quadratically: where Πh is a measure of diversity that reduces to π1, o when h = 0.5 (see Appendix). This slower response is the mathematical consequence of the intuition provided by Figures 1 and 2: Right after the split, the fitnesses are identical and the efficacy of selection is the same in both populations. It takes time for drift to increase the variance in allele frequency and cause differences in the efficacy of selection, accounting for a factor . It then takes time for differences in the efficacy of selection to accumulate and produce differences in fitness, accounting for an additional factor st.
Combining Equations (6) and (7), we get an asymptotic result for the load differentiation.
This expression describes the leading differentiation in fitness in all simulations below. It is straightforward to refine this asymptotic result by computing higher-order corrections, however the number of terms in the expansion increases rapidly. Some of these terms are of particular interest, such as the contribution of new mutations. Since the direct effect of mutation on load is independent of demography [Equation (4)], we must wait for mutations to accumulate before load differentiation can begin. This leads an additional factor of ut compared to the case of standing variation. The contribution of drift acting on new recessive mutations is therefore quadratic:
The effect of selection on new mutations is only cubic in time: We must wait for mutations to appear (contributing a factor of ut), then wait for drift to cause differences on the frequency distribution of the new mutations [contributing a factor of ], and finally wait for selection to act on these frequency distribution differences (contributing a factor of st.) The leading contribution of selection is therefore
Finally, since drift alone does not produce differences in average allele frequencies, the rate of differentiation in deleterious allele frequencies is always quadratic in time:
3 Simulations
We simulated the evolution of ϕ(x, t) using ∂a∂i [28] and the Out-Of-Africa (OOA) demographic model illustrated in Figure 3A. This model begins with an ancestral population of size Nr = 11930 with frequency distribution following the quasi-stationary distribution of Kimura [29], and features population splits and size changes that were inferred from synonymous polymorphism from the 1000 Genomes dataset [30]. We estimated the probability ϕn(i, t) that a variant is at frequency i in a finite sample of size n = 100 for each population, given a mutation rate of µ = 1.44 × 10−8bp−1 generation−1 [31] in an infinite genome. We used the finite sample predictions to estimate the expected genetic load and the contributions of drift, selection, and mutation. Finally, to ensure that results were not model-dependent, we repeated each simulation using a different demographic model described in [15], featuring a single deeper but shorter OOA bottleneck.
We simulated all combinations of selection coefficients 2Nrs ∈ {0, –0.01, –0.1, –0.3, –1, –3, –10, –30, –100}, and dominance coefficients h ∈ {0,0.05,0.2,0.3,0.5,1}. The contributions of selection and drift were obtained using Equation (4). To emphasize the long-term effects of the OOA bottleneck even after drift is suppressed, simulations were also carried to future times assuming large population sizes (N = 20Nr) and no migrations (Figure S6). In all cases, Equations (8), (9), and (10) capture the initial increase in load (Figures 3, S1, S2, and S7).
3.1 Genic selection; h = 1/2
Simulated differences in load are modest and limited to intermediate-effect variants (.3 < |2Nrs| < 30, 2.5x10−5 < |s| < 0.0025). Assuming the distribution of fitness effects inferred from European-American data by Boyko et al. [32], the excess load in the OOA population is 0.49 per Gb of amino-acid-changing variants, in addition to a total accumulated load of 24 per Gb in the African population (this accumulated load does not include variation that was fixed at the time of the split). If we consider the 24 Mb of exome covered by the 1000 Genomes project, and assume that 70% of mutations are coding in that region [33], the model predicts a non-synonymous load difference of 0.008. The total estimated non-synonymous load, excluding mutations fixed in the ancestral state, is 0.4 in the African-American population. In this model, the reduced efficacy of selection caused by the OOA bottleneck leads to a relative increase in non-recessive load of 2%. Since we did not consider fixed ancestral deleterious alleles in the total load, this figure is an overestimate of the relative increase in load due to the bottleneck. The relative increase reaches a maximum of 8% for mutations with –20 < 2Nrs < –10. The results are similar if we use the distribution of fitness effects inferred from African-American data [32].
Using the simple bottleneck demographic model of Do et al [15], we find very similar load (24 per Gbp) and load differences across populations (2% of the total load).
3.2 Partial and complete dominance
The picture changes dramatically when we consider recessive deleterious variants (h = 0). Reactions to changes in population size are linear rather than quadratic, and they are more substantial than in the additive case (Figure S1). The OOA load due to segregating variants with 2Nrs = –100 almost doubles after 500 generations. This excess load in the OOA population is due entirely to drift, and leads to an increased efficacy of selection in the OOA population, since a higher proportion of deleterious alleles are now visible to selection. The difference in load for the most deleterious variants is therefore not sustained.
Both the number of very deleterious variants and the associated genetic load eventually becomes higher in the simulated Yoruba population. By contrast, weak-effect deleterious variants contribute more load in the simulated European population.
Even though a bottleneck inexorably leads to increased load when no dominance is present, the additional exposure of recessive variants therefore leads to ‘purging’, a reduction of the frequency of deleterious alleles (see [2] and references therein). Simulations show that the increase in recessive load can last hundreds or thousands of generations for weakly deleterious variants. Gl´emin argued that the purging effect is suppressed in constant-sized population when Ns is much less than “2 to 5”. [2]. This also holds in a non-equilibrium setting in recessive alleles going through a bottleneck (Figure S1, see also [34]). The time required for purging to compensate the initial fitness loss increases rapidly as the magnitude of the selection coefficients decreases: Whereas our model predicts a reduced load in present-day OOA populations for alleles with 2Nrs = –100, it would take over 20, 000 generations of continued isolation in large constant-sized population to see purging in alleles with 2Nrs = –3 (Figure S6).
Opposite effects are observed for dominant deleterious variants (Figure S7). Drift tends to increase fitness by combining more of the deleterious alleles into homozygotes, reducing their average effect on fitness. The difference between populations is much less pronounced and less sustained than in the recessive case. Equation (6) shows that the reduced magnitude is caused by reduced ancestral heterozygosity, π1, 0: Dominant deleterious alleles are much less likely to reach appreciable allele frequencies before the split. Here again, the population with the highest load depends on the selection coefficient, with a higher load in the simulated European population for strongly deleterious variants and a higher load in the simulated Yoruba population for the weakly deleterious variants.
The distribution of dominance coefficients for mutations in humans is largely unknown, but non-human studies suggest that partial recessive may be the norm (see, e.g., [35] and references therein). Under models with h = 0.2, we find that the genetic load is elevated in OOA populations for most selection coefficients Nrs, whereas the additive genetic load is mostly reduced (Figure S3B-C and S4B-C). These simulations suggest that the rate of adaptation was reduced in OOA populations (i.e., the genetic load is higher in OOA population), while the efficacy of selection was higher in the OOA population, whether it is measured by the Morton efficacy or the FIT efficacy (Figure S5). Thus, unless most nearly-neutral variation has h > 0.20, we do not expect an overall elevated number of deleterious variants in OOA populations. As we move closer to additive selection, for example at h = 0.3, the contributions of alleles with larger and weaker selection coefficient are of comparable magnitude and opposite direction. Because of our limited ability to estimate selection coefficients in humans, this might explain why observing differences in the overall frequency of deleterious alleles between populations has been so difficult. This also suggests that any claim for an across-the-board difference in the efficacy of selection between two populations will have to rely on a number of assumptions about fitness coefficients in human populations.
4 Present-day differences in the efficacy and intensity of selection
The Wright-Fisher predictions for the instantaneous Morton and FIT efficacies of selection, Equations (3) and (5), depend on the present-day allele frequency distribution, on the dominance coefficient h, and on the selection coefficient s. However, s is a multiplicative factor in both equations and cancels out when we consider the relative rate of adaptation across populations. We can therefore use Equations (3) and (5) to estimate differences in the efficacy of selection between populations based on the present-day distribution of allele frequencies. For nearly-neutral alleles, the present-day frequency distribution is similar to the neutral frequency spectrum and largely independent of h. We can therefore use the present-day frequency spectrum for synonymous variation to estimate the relative efficacy of selection for all nearly-neutral alleles at different values of h (Figure 4). Figures S10 and S11 show similar results for non-synonymous and predicted deleterious alleles (For the most deleterious classes, the assumption that the present-day frequency spectra depend weakly on h is less accurate).
In the nearly-neutral case, the Luhya population (LWK) shows the highest Morton an FIT efficacy of selection for most dominance parameters and is used as a basis of comparison. The estimated FIT efficacy of selection is higher in African population for all dominance coefficients, as is the Morton efficacy, except for completely recessive alleles. The reduction in Morton’s efficacy of selection for nearly-neutral variation in OOA populations is 25% to 39% for dominant variants, 19% to 31% for additive variants, and 6% to 13% for fully recessive variants. The reduction in the FIT efficacy in OOA populations is 29% to 44% for dominant variants, 19% to 31% for additive variants, and 0.2% to 6% for fully recessive variants. This is also consistent with the interpretation of Gl´emin that purging, the reduction in the frequency of recessive alleles caused by a bottleneck, is not expected for nearly neutral variants. By contrast, estimates using sites with high predicted pathogenicity according to CADD [36] do suggest that purging of deleterious variation by drift is still ongoing in OOA populations (Figures S10 and S11).
Admixed populations from the Americas with the highest African ancestry proportion also show elevated efficacy of selection: African-Americans (75.9% African ancestry [37]), Puerto Rican (14.8% African ancestry [31]), Colombians (7.8% African ancestry [31]), and Mexican-Americans (5.4% African ancestry [31]). The Morton efficacy of selection in admixed populations is much larger than the weighted average of source populations would suggest (Figure 4C, which uses CHB, CEU, and YRI as ancestral population proxies for Native, European, and African ancestries). By averaging out some of the genetic drift experienced by the source populations since their divergence, admixture increases the overall amount of additive variance in the population, and therefore leads to a substantial and rapid increase in the predicted efficacy of selection for nearly neutral alleles.
5 Discussion
Selection affects evolution in many ways. It tends to increase the frequency of favourable alleles and the overall fitness of a population, and it often reduces diversity. The rates at which it performs these tasks varies across populations, and population geneticists like to frame these differences in terms of the efficacy of selection. The word ‘efficacy’ implies a measure of achievement, but there are many ways to define achievement for selection. We considered two measure of achievement: the change in deleterious allele frequency (i.e., Morton’s efficacy), and the change in load caused by selection (i.e., the FIT efficacy). Even though the two quantities are closely related, and are equal for additive selection, Morton’s efficacy is much easier to measure: systematic differences in the frequency of deleterious alleles are robust to drift and to modest changes in the environment. By contrast, the FIT efficacy is impossible to observe directly and requires picking apart the contributions of selection, drift, and the environment. Given the long-standing controversy about how this should be done in the context of Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem [38], we would advise against using it.
We have argued that other popular measures for the efficacy of selection [13, 19, 8, 17] are biased in out-of-equilibrium populations studied over short time-scales. Many previous claims that selection acted differentially in human populations [13, 8] could be explained by these biases. Confirming this interpretation, Fu et al. [18] found no differences in the average frequency of deleterious alleles between African-Americans and European-Americans in the ESP 6500 dataset [39]. However, they did report a slight but extremely significant difference in the average number of deleterious alleles per individual for a set of putatively deleterious SNPs. The contrasting results are surprising, since the two statistics are equal up to a multiplicative constant: the average number of deleterious alleles per genome equals the mean frequency of deleterious alleles multiplied by the number of loci. We could reproduce the results from [18], but found that the statistical test used did not account for variability introduced by genetic drift in a finite genome: results remained significant if allele frequencies were randomly permuted between African-Americans and European-Americans (see Section S1.1 for details). This emphasizes that an empirical observation of differences in genetic load must be robust to both finite sample size and finite genome to be attributed to differences in the efficacy of selection.
Figures 4, S10 and S11 strongly suggest that the OOA bottleneck still influences the present-day efficacy of selection. By extension, they also suggest that the efficacy of selection did differ and will differ among populations. Importantly, the differences in frequency distributions across populations that provide this support are not a consequence of past differences in the efficacy of selection but a possible cause for such differences in the present and future. We have shown that some of the future differences are not inevitable and can be attenuated by demographic processes including admixture. Therefore, measuring actual differences in the efficacy of selection can only be achieved by measuring actual differences in the average frequency or effect of deleterious alleles.
Simulations presented here, together with the results of [14, 15], do suggest that the classical prediction on the differential efficacy of selection in small populations can be verified if only we can accurately isolate variants of specific selective effect and dominance coefficients. By picking apart variants of different selection and dominance coefficients, we should soon be able to convincingly and directly observe the consequences of differences in the efficacy of selection. The recent results of Henn et al. [17], using a version of Morton’s efficacy, do suggest such differences for a subset of variants and therefore provide important experimental validation for a classical population genetics prediction. By contrast, the observation of genome-wide differences in the efficacy of selection across populations depends on the cancellation of effects across different variant classes, and can therefore depend sensitively on the particular choice of a metric. For this reason, overall differences in load among populations may not be particularly informative about the fundamental processes governing human evolution.
6 Acknowledgements
I thank S. Baharian, M. Barakatt, B. Henn, D. Nelson, and S. Lessard for useful comments on this manuscript, and W. Fu and J. Akey for help in reproducing their results. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs program and a Sloan Research Fellowship.
A1 Appendix
A1.1 Background
To derive the asymptotic results in the text, we start with the diffusion approximation for the distribution ϕ(x, t) of allele frequencies x over time t in an infinite-sites model (see [26], section 8.6): where N is the effective population size, h is the dominance coefficient, s is the selection coefficient, and u is the mutation rate. In this model, new mutations are constantly added via Dirac’s delta function δ. Because there are no back mutations in this model, the proportion of fixed mutations increases over time without bound. Because we are only interested in population differences accumulating over a short time span, however, we can simply ignore the (infinite) number of deleterious alleles that fixed before the population split. The time-scales that we will consider are short enough that back-mutations and multiple mutations contribute little to changes in allele frequencies.
A complete solution of this problem can be expressed as a superposition of Gegenbauer polynomials [29]. However, here we are looking for simple asymptotic results that will help us understand the dynamics of the problem. We will consider the evolution of moments of the allele frequency distribution: . Similar moment approaches have been used in [23, 24]. Because there is a possibly infinite number of fixed sites at frequencies 0 and 1, it is often convenient to distinguish contributions from segregating sites and fixed sites: where K0 is the number of sites fixed at frequency 0, K1 is the number of sites fixed at frequency 1, and δk, 0 is Kronecker’s delta. Both K0 and K1 can be infinite in this model, but this will not be a problem since we will ultimately consider only differences or rates of change in the moments, and these remain finite. In this notation, µ0 is the (possibly infinite) number of sites, and µ1 is the expected number of alternate alleles per haploid genome.
To obtain evolution equations for the moments, we integrate both sides of equation (A1) using . The left-hand side gives and the right-hand side can be integrated by parts. For k = 0, this yields where ϕ(0, t) and ϕ(1, t) are defined by continuity from the open interval (0,1) and do not include fixed sites. Because the number of sites is constant and the diffusion equation is continuous, we require
These equations are equivalent to Equations 3.18 and 3.19 in [29].
To obtain an evolution equation for µk at arbitrary k, we return to the integration of Equation (A1) with . We use the left-hand-side expression obtained in Equation (A2), and once again integrate the right-hand side by parts. This yields where
These are functions of the moments µ and can therefore be thought of as measures of the shape of the frequency distribution ϕ.
The first term in (A4) represents the effect of drift, the second term the effect of selection, and the third term the effect of mutation.
For example, if k = 1 and h = 1/2, we get
The frequency of damaging alleles can decrease because of selection, or increase because of mutation.
A1.2 Response in allele frequencies
Solving Equation (A4) in general is challenging, because can depend on µk+1 and µk+2, leading to an infinite number of coupled equations. However, it can be used to calculate the response in allele frequency to a sudden change in demographic or selective conditions. Consider a population of size No that experiences a change in size to NA at time t = 0. We can expand µk for short times: where µk, o is the kth moment prior to the population size change and O(t3) represent terms at least cubic in t. The coefficients can be evaluated by expanding both sides of Equation (A4) using Equation (A6), then collecting powers of t. For example, we get
The frequency of variants can increase even in a steady-state regime with NA = No, since our model assumes a constant supply of irreversible mutations. However, this linear term is independent of NA and does not contribute to differences across populations that share a common ancestor. Differences Δµ1(t) in the number of segregating sites between two populations with sizes NA and NB appear at the next order in t. Computations are elementary but a bit more cumbersome. Matching terms linear in t in Equation (A4), we find equation (10): where πi, o is the moment πi computed for the common ancestral population.
A1.3 Response in genetic load
To compute the fitness in the diploid case, we write
Using (A4), we get where are the instantaneous contributions of selection, mutation, and drift to changes in fitness. The mutation term is constant in time and independent of population size; it does not directly contribute to differences across populations. The drift term, by contrast, has an explicit dependence on the population size; this leads to differentiation between populations that grows linearly in time. To see this, we compute the load using Equation (A7) and the time dependence computed in Equation (A6), as in section A1.2:
This reduction in load is driven by drift, i.e., the third term in equation (A9). It is not caused by selection, in the sense that it does not result from differential reproductive success between individuals. As expected, the contribution of drift vanishes for additive variants (h = 1/2).
For arbitrary h, the change in fitness caused by selection is where Πh is a statistic of the ancestral frequency distribution: which reduces to the heterozygosity π1,0 when h = 1/2. The statistic Πh depends only on the ancestral frequency distribution and the dominance coefficient.
Genetic drift also contributes to the changes in load at second order in t through . In addition to the linear term from Equation (A10), we find three quadratic contributions that vanish when h = 1/2: a second-order contribution of genetic drift, a contribution from the rate of change in population size and drift, and a contribution from new mutations and drift. Even though these terms can be comparable in magnitude to the contribution of selection in Equation (A11) when h ≠ 1/2, they are sub-dominant to Equation (A10). We only consider the contribution of new mutations in some detail, as this contribution tells us whether population differentiation in the genetic load is due to old, shared variation or to new, population specific variation.
A1.4 Effect of new mutations
If we set πi,o = 0 in the equations above, we can calculate the impact of new mutations on the genetic load. The leading term is again due to drift and dominance: while the leading term describing the efficacy of selection is now cubic in t:
When h ≠ 1/2, drift also contributes t3 terms to ΔWnew. These are reasonably straightforward to compute, but are sub-dominant to Equation (A12).
We therefore use the asymptotic result:
Comparisons with simulated data are shown on Figure S9.