A Method to Correct for the Effects of Purifying Selection on Genealogical Inference

Accurate reconstruction of the divergence times among individuals is an essential step toward inferring population parameters from genetic data. However, our ability to reconstruct accurate genealogies is often thwarted by the evolutionary forces we hope to detect, most prominently natural selection. Here, I demonstrate that purifying selection acting at many linked sites can systematically bias current methods of genealogical reconstruction, and I present a new method that corrects for this bias by allowing a class of sites to have a time-dependent rate. The parameters influencing the time dependency can be estimated from the data, allowing for a general method to detect the presence of selected sites and correcting for their distortion of the apparent mutation rate. The method works well under a variety of scenarios, including gamma-distributed selection coefficients as well as entirely neutral evolution. I also compare the performance of the new method to relaxed clock models, and I demonstrate the method on a data set from the mitochondrion of the North Atlantic whale-louse Cyamus ovalis.