DNA sequence diversity and the efficiency of natural selection in animal mitochondrial DNA.

ABSTRACT: Selection is expected to be more efficient in species that are more diverse because both the efficiency of natural selection and DNA sequence diversity are expected to depend upon the effective population size. We explore this relationship across a data set of 751 mammal species for which we have mitochondrial polymorphism data. We introduce a method by which we can examine the relationship between our measure of the efficiency of natural selection, the nonsynonymous relative to the synonymous nucleotide site diversity (π_N/π_S), and synonymous nucleotide diversity (π_S), avoiding the statistical non-independence between the two quantities. We show that these two variables are strongly negatively and linearly correlated on a log scale. The slope is such that a

SUBMITTER: James J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5176113 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature