Journal
GENOME BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Volume 6, Issue 5, Pages 1238-1252Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evu099
Keywords
high throughput sequencing; haploid; diploid; haploid-dominant life cycle; intragametophytic selfing; outcrossing; deleterious mutations
Categories
Funding
- Swiss National Science Foundation, Ambizione [PZ00P3_131726]
- URPP pilot grant of the Systems Biology/Functional Genomics priority program of the University of Zurich
- Swiss National Science Foundation [315230-129708, 31003A_140917]
- University Priority Research Program in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Zurich
- NSF [DEB-0918998]
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) [PZ00P3_131726, 31003A_140917] Funding Source: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In diploid organisms, selfing reduces the efficiency of selection in removing deleterious mutations from a population. This need not be the case for all organisms. Some plants, for example, undergo an extreme form of selfing known as intragametophytic selfing, which immediately exposes all recessive deleterious mutations in a parental genome to selective purging. Here, we ask how effectively deleterious mutations are removed from such plants. Specifically, we study the extent to which deleterious mutations accumulate in a predominantly selfing and a predominantly outcrossing pair of moss species, using genome-wide transcriptome data. We find that the selfing species purge significantly more nonsynonymous mutations, as well as a greater proportion of radical amino acid changes which alter physicochemical properties of amino acids. Moreover, their purging of deleterious mutation is especially strong in conserved regions of protein-coding genes. Our observations show that selfing need not impede but can even accelerate the removal of deleterious mutations, and do so on a genome-wide scale.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available