Purifying Selection Influences the Comparison of Heterozygosities between Populations.

ABSTRACT: Heterozygosity is a fundamental measure routinely used to compare between populations to infer the level of genetic variation and their relative effective population sizes. However, such comparison is highly influenced by the magnitude of selection pressure on the genomic regions used. Using over 2 million Single Nucleotide Variants (SNVs) from chimpanzee and mouse populations, this study shows that the heterozygosities estimated using neutrally evolving sites of large populations were two times higher than those of small populations. However, this difference was only ~1.6 times for the heterozygosities estimated using nonsynonymous sites. This suggests an excess in the nonsynonymous heterozygosities due to the segregation of deleterious variants in small populations. This excess in the no

SUBMITTER: Subramanian S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11505596 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature