The deleterious mutation load is insensitive to recent population history.

ABSTRACT: Human populations have undergone major changes in population size in the past 100,000 years, including recent rapid growth. How these demographic events have affected the burden of deleterious mutations in individuals and the frequencies of disease mutations in populations remains unclear. We use population genetic models to show that recent human demography has probably had little impact on the average burden of deleterious mutations. This prediction is supported by two exome sequence data sets showing that individuals of west African and European ancestry carry very similar burdens of damaging mutations. We further show that for many diseases, rare alleles are unlikely to contribute a large fraction of the heritable variation, and therefore the impact of recent growth is likely to be mod

SUBMITTER: Simons YB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3953611 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature