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MBE Advance Access originally published online on January 15, 2009
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2009 26(4):715-717; doi:10.1093/molbev/msp005
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Letter

Temporal Trails of Natural Selection in Human Mitogenomes

Sankar Subramanian*,{dagger}

* Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Institute of Molecular BioSciences, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
{dagger} Griffith School of Environment, Griffith University, Nathan, Qld, Australia

E-mail: s.subramanian{at}griffith.edu.au.

Accepted for publication January 8, 2009.

Mildly deleterious mutations initially contribute to the diversity of a population, but later they are selected against at high frequency and are eliminated eventually. Using over 1,500 complete human mitochondrial genomes along with those of Neanderthal and Chimpanzee, I provide empirical evidence for this prediction by tracing the footprints of natural selection over time. The results show a highly significant inverse relationship between the ratio of nonsynonymous-to-synonymous divergence (dN/dS) and the age of human haplogroups. Furthermore, this study suggests that slightly deleterious mutations constitute up to 80% of the mitochondrial amino acid replacement mutations detected in human populations and that over the last 500,000 years these mutations have been gradually removed.

Key Words: human evolution • haplogroups • natural selection • deleterious mutations • coalescence time and the neutral theory

Associate Editor, Ziheng Yang


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