Journal
HEREDITY
Volume 99, Issue 4, Pages 364-373Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/sj.hdy.6801031
Keywords
positive selection; nearly neutral theory; nucleotide substitution
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Funding
- NIGMS NIH HHS [R01 GM043940-18, R01 GM043940, GM43940] Funding Source: Medline
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Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in evidence for positive Darwinian selection at the molecular level. This quest has been hampered by the use of statistical methods that fail adequately to rule out alternative hypotheses, particularly the relaxation of purifying selection and the effects of population bottlenecks, during which the effectiveness of purifying selection is reduced. A further problem has been the assumption that positive selection will generally involve repeated amino-acid changes to a single protein. This model was derived from the case of the vertebrate major histocompatibility complex (MHC), but the MHC proteins are unusual in being involved in protein protein recognition and in a co-evolutionary process of pathogens. There is no reason to suppose that repeated amino-acid changes to a single protein are involved in selectively advantageous phenotypes in general. Rather adaptive phenotypes are much more likely to result from other causes, including single amino-acid changes; deletion or silencing of genes or changes in the pattern of gene expression.
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