Origin and Evolution of Deleterious Mutations in Horses.

ABSTRACT: Domestication has changed the natural evolutionary trajectory of horses by favoring the reproduction of a limited number of animals showing traits of interest. Reduced breeding stocks hampered the elimination of deleterious variants by means of negative selection, ultimately inflating mutational loads. However, ancient genomics revealed that mutational loads remained steady during most of the domestication history until a sudden burst took place some 250 years ago. To identify the factors underlying this trajectory, we gather an extensive dataset consisting of 175 modern and 153 ancient genomes previously published, and carry out the most comprehensive characterization of deleterious mutations in horses. We confirm that deleterious variants segregated at low frequencies during the last 350

SUBMITTER: Orlando L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6769756 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature