Inferring the distribution of mutational effects on fitness in Drosophila.

ABSTRACT: The properties of the distribution of deleterious mutational effects on fitness (DDME) are of fundamental importance for evolutionary genetics. Since it is extremely difficult to determine the nature of this distribution, several methods using various assumptions about the DDME have been developed, for the purpose of parameter estimation. We apply a newly developed method to DNA sequence polymorphism data from two Drosophila species and compare estimates of the parameters of the distribution of the heterozygous fitness effects of amino acid mutations for several different distribution functions. The results exclude normal and gamma distributions, since these predict too few effectively lethal mutations and power-law distributions as a result of predicting too many lethals. Only the lognorm

SUBMITTER: Loewe L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1686194 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature