Evolutionary Shortcuts via Multinucleotide Substitutions and Their Impact on Natural Selection Analyses.

ABSTRACT: Inference and interpretation of evolutionary processes, in particular of the types and targets of natural selection affecting coding sequences, are critically influenced by the assumptions built into statistical models and tests. If certain aspects of the substitution process (even when they are not of direct interest) are presumed absent or are modeled with too crude of a simplification, estimates of key model parameters can become biased, often systematically, and lead to poor statistical performance. Previous work established that failing to accommodate multinucleotide (or multihit, MH) substitutions strongly biases dN/dS-based inference towards false-positive inferences of diversifying episodic selection, as does failing to model variation in the rate of synonymous substitution (SRV) a

SUBMITTER: Lucaci AG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10336034 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature