Antagonistic pleiotropy conceals molecular adaptations in changing environments.

ABSTRACT: The importance of positive selection in molecular evolution is debated. Evolution experiments under invariant laboratory conditions typically show a higher rate of nonsynonymous nucleotide changes than the rate of synonymous changes, demonstrating prevalent molecular adaptations. Natural evolution inferred from genomic comparisons, however, almost always exhibits the opposite pattern even among closely related conspecifics, which is indicative of a paucity of positive selection. Here we hypothesize that this apparent contradiction is at least in part attributable to ubiquitous and frequent environmental changes in nature, causing nonsynonymous mutations that are beneficial at one time to become deleterious soon after because of antagonistic pleiotropy and hindering their fixations relative

SUBMITTER: Chen P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7058517 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature