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- Axelsson, Erik, et al.
(författare)
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Comparison of the chicken and turkey genomes reveals a higher rate of nucleotide divergence on microchromosomes than macrochromosomes.
- 2005
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Ingår i: Genome Res. - 1088-9051. ; 15:1, s. 120-5
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A distinctive feature of the avian genome is the large heterogeneity in the size of chromosomes, which are usually classified into a small number of macrochromosomes and numerous microchromosomes. These chromosome classes show characteristic differences in a number of interrelated features that could potentially affect the rate of sequence evolution, such as GC content, gene density, and recombination rate. We studied the effects of these factors by analyzing patterns of nucleotide substitution in two sets of chicken-turkey sequence alignments. First, in a set of 67 orthologous introns, divergence was significantly higher in microchromosomes (chromosomes 11-38; 11.7% divergence) than in both macrochromosomes (chromosomes 1-5; 9.9% divergence; P = 0.016) and intermediate-sized chromosomes (chromosomes 6-10; 9.5% divergence; P = 0.026). At least part of this difference was due to the higher incidence of CpG sites on microchromosomes. Second, using 155 orthologous coding sequences we noted a similar pattern, in which synonymous substitution rates on microchromosomes (13.1%) were significantly higher than were rates on macrochromosomes (10.3%; P = 0.024). Broadly assuming neutrality of introns and synonymous sites, or constraints on such sequences do not differ between chromosomal classes, these observations imply that microchromosomal genes are exposed to more germ line mutations than those on other chromosomes. We also find that dN/dS ratios for genes located on microchromosomes (average, 0.094) are significantly lower than those of macrochromosomes (average, 0.185; P = 0.025), suggesting that the proteins of genes on microchromosomes are under greater evolutionary constraint.
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- Berlin, Sofia, et al.
(författare)
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Testing for adaptive evolution of the female reproductive protein ZPC in mammals, birds and fishes reveals problems with the M7-M8 likelihood ratio test.
- 2005
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Ingår i: BMC Evolutionary Biology. - 1471-2148. ; 5, s. 65-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- BACKGROUND: Adaptive evolution appears to be a common feature of reproductive proteins across a very wide range of organisms. A promising way of addressing the evolutionary forces responsible for this general phenomenon is to test for adaptive evolution in the same gene but among groups of species, which differ in their reproductive biology. One can then test evolutionary hypotheses by asking whether the variation in adaptive evolution is consistent with the variation in reproductive biology. We have attempted to apply this approach to the study of a female reproductive protein, zona pellucida C (ZPC), which has been previously shown by the use of likelihood ratio tests (LRTs) to be under positive selection in mammals. RESULTS: We tested for evidence of adaptive evolution of ZPC in 15 mammalian species, in 11 avian species and in six fish species using three different LRTs (M1a-M2a, M7-M8, and M8a-M8). The only significant findings of adaptive evolution came from the M7-M8 test in mammals and fishes. Since LRTs of adaptive evolution may yield false positives in some situations, we examined the properties of the LRTs by several different simulation methods. When we simulated data to test the robustness of the LRTs, we found that the pattern of evolution in ZPC generates an excess of false positives for the M7-M8 LRT but not for the M1a-M2a or M8a-M8 LRTs. This bias is strong enough to have generated the significant M7-M8 results for mammals and fishes. CONCLUSION: We conclude that there is no strong evidence for adaptive evolution of ZPC in any of the vertebrate groups we studied, and that the M7-M8 LRT can be biased towards false inference of adaptive evolution by certain patterns of non-adaptive evolution.
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- Smith, Nick G C, et al.
(författare)
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A low rate of simultaneous double-nucleotide mutations in primates.
- 2003
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 20:1, s. 47-53
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The occurrence of double-nucleotide (doublet) mutations is contrary to the normal assumption that point mutations affect single nucleotides. Here we develop a new method for estimating the doublet mutation rate and apply it to more than a megabase of human-chimpanzee-baboon genomic DNA alignments and more than a million human single-nucleotide polymorphisms. The new method accounts for the effect of regional variation in evolutionary rates, which may be a confounding factor in previous estimates of the doublet mutation rate. Furthermore we determine sequence context effects by using sequence comparisons over a variety of lineage lengths. This approach yields a new estimate of the doublet mutation rate of 0.3% of the singleton rate, indicating that doublet mutations are far rarer than previously thought. Our results suggest that doublet mutations are unlikely to have caused the correlation between synonymous and nonsynonymous substitution rates in mammals, and also show that regional variation and sequence context effects play an important role in primate DNA sequence evolution.
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- Smith, Nick G C, et al.
(författare)
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Deterministic mutation rate variation in the human genome.
- 2002
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Ingår i: Genome Research. - : Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. - 1088-9051 .- 1549-5469. ; 12:9, s. 1350-6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Several studies of substitution rate variation have indicated that the local mutation rate varies over the mammalian genome. In the present study, we show significant variation in substitution rates within the noncoding part of the human genome using 4.7 Mb of human-chimpanzee pairwise comparisons. Moreover, we find a significant positive covariation of lineage-specific chimpanzee and human local substitution rates, and very similar mean substitution rates down the two lineages. The substitution rate variation is probably not caused by selection or biased gene conversion, and so we conclude that mutation rates vary deterministically across the noncoding nonrepetitive regions of the human genome. We also show that noncoding substitution rates are significantly affected by G+C base composition, partly because the base composition is not at equilibrium.
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