An age-of-allele test of neutrality for transposable element insertions.

ABSTRACT: How natural selection acts to limit the proliferation of transposable elements (TEs) in genomes has been of interest to evolutionary biologists for many years. To describe TE dynamics in populations, previous studies have used models of transposition-selection equilibrium that assume a constant rate of transposition. However, since TE invasions are known to happen in bursts through time, this assumption may not be reasonable. Here we propose a test of neutrality for TE insertions that does not rely on the assumption of a constant transposition rate. We consider the case of TE insertions that have been ascertained from a single haploid reference genome sequence. By conditioning on the age of an individual TE insertion allele (inferred by the number of unique substitutions that have occurred

SUBMITTER: Blumenstiel JP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3914624 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature