RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 No evidence that natural selection has been less effective at removing deleterious mutations in Europeans than in West Africans
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 002865
DO 10.1101/002865
A1 Ron Do
A1 Daniel Balick
A1 Heng Li
A1 Ivan Adzhubei
A1 Shamil Sunyaev
A1 David Reich
YR 2014
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/02/20/002865.abstract
AB Non-African populations have experienced major bottlenecks in the time since their split from West Africans, which has led to the hypothesis that natural selection to remove weakly deleterious mutations may have been less effective in non-Africans. To directly test this hypothesis, we measure the per-genome accumulation of deleterious mutations across diverse humans. We fail to detect any significant differences, but find that archaic Denisovans accumulated non-synonymous mutations at a higher rate than modern humans, consistent with the longer separation time of modern and archaic humans. We also revisit the empirical patterns that have been interpreted as evidence for less effective removal of deleterious mutations in non-Africans than in West Africans, and show they are not driven by differences in selection after population separation, but by neutral evolution.