Compensatory Evolution Following Deleterious Episodes of GC-biased Gene Conversion in Rodents.

ABSTRACT: GC-biased gene conversion (gBGC) is a widespread evolutionary force associated with meiotic recombination that favors the accumulation of deleterious AT to GC substitutions in proteins, moving them away from their fitness optimum. In many mammals, recombination hotspots have a rapid turnover, leading to episodic gBGC, with the accumulation of deleterious mutations stopping when the recombination hotspot dies. Selection is therefore expected to act to repair the damage caused by gBGC episodes through compensatory evolution. However, this process has never been studied or quantified so far. Here, we analyzed the nucleotide substitution pattern in coding sequences of a highly diversified group of Murinae rodents. Using phylogenetic analyses of about 70,000 coding exons, we identified numerous

SUBMITTER: Riffis M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12290510 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature