Mitochondrial DNA Genomes Reveal Relaxed Purifying Selection During Human Population Expansion after the Last Glacial Maximum.

ABSTRACT: Modern humans have experienced explosive population growth in the past thousand years. We hypothesized that recent human populations have inhabited environments with relaxation of selective constraints, possibly due to the more abundant food supply after the Last Glacial Maximum. The ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous mutations (N/S ratio) is a useful and common statistic for measuring selective constraints. In this study, we reconstructed a high-resolution phylogenetic tree using a total of 26,419 East Eurasian mitochondrial DNA genomes, which were further classified into expansion and nonexpansion groups on the basis of the frequencies of their founder lineages. We observed a much higher N/S ratio in the expansion group, especially for nonsynonymous mutations with moderately deleteriou

SUBMITTER: Zheng HX 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11373649 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature